Stonemasonry: Building a Stone Wall

Enlarge Image Image Gallery John Vivian learned stonemasonry by studying an existing stone wall. PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

My introduction to building a stone wall, like beginnings in so many homesteading skills, came unexpectedly, urgently, and at the wrong time. It was a rare clear morning during a rainy spring in the late 60's, and I was leaving for work from the once-derelict farm in upper Bucks County, Pennsylvania that provided my weekend refuge from a city job. The buildings on the place were 150-plus years old and had yard-thick stone walls. The house was stuccoed on the outside and was in fair shape, but the barn had been badly neglected. Its leaky roof rested on ten-foot-high walls that were originally constructed as a sandwich: vertical rock faces of rounded fieldstone on the outside with a mud-mortar/rubble stone mix on the inside. Most of the "pointing" (mortar troweled into the cracks between rocks to retard weathering out of the interior) was long gone. Winter rain or snow meltwater had run in, frozen, and gradually worked that mortar out, and the interior mud packing had gradually followed suit, until—in places—you could see clear through the walls. Still, the rock itself had been laid up well enough to stand through generations of rain and storm.

Till that day, that is. On walking to the car, I found that the thunderstorms that had kept me awake half the night had also washed out the southwest corner of the barn, along with half of each adjoining wall. Now, the roof was kind of fluttering in the wind . . . ready to follow the south wall downhill.

I hastily shored up the roof with old framing timbers, traded my Brooks Brothers/Florsheim city uniform for honest Sears/Endicott Johnson, and ordered up a few days' vacation from work. Then, when the Yellow Pages failed to produce any stonemasons at all (and the only general masonry contractor who'd talk to me recommended that we tear the walls down and let him put up a building-code-acceptable concrete-block foundation), I set about teaching myself stonemasonry the only way I could, by studying the barn foundation itself: walls that had been built shortly after the American Revolution by dirt farmers with no architecture degrees, no building codes, no engines to ease the strain-just common sense and hands-on experience, simple ramps, levers and pulleys, a team of draft animals to pull the stone boat, and strong backs unafraid of work.

My slow-learner's repair job took the better part of a week, and most sections were built and torn down and rebuilt several times before I got them half right. But I can honestly say that the sense of satisfaction I felt on finally completing that barn wall did more than any other single experience to move me out of the urban rat race and into a life of self-dependence on the land.

First Lessons in Stonemasonry

I 'd suggest that what I did for lack of any alternative—study an existing wall and copy it—is the best way for folks to learn stone building on their own hook. Granted, as with most anything, a master of the trade can teach you faster (some would say better ), and I've learned a lot from proper masons. However, stone building is a highly individual skill, so once you have the basics down, you simply have to put in time working with the stone to develop your own style.