Fall River: A City and Its Stone

FALL RIVER A CITY AND ITS STONE

Cyrus Dahmubed ARCH 6140 Prof. Ang Li Northeastern University School of Architecture

FALL RIVER GRANITE SITES OF EXTRACTION Beattie Quarry Assonet Ledge Quarry MANIFESTATIONS Metacomet Mill Fall River Station ALTERNATE ENDINGS Statue of Libery Stone Cemetery

Cover image source: Digital Commonwealth.

“City of Fall River, Mass. 1877” by O. H. Bailley

FALL RIVER GRANITE

For many cities, the industrial era meant a time of a great production. Often what was produced, and the resulting prosperity and growth of the city, was predicated on what natural resources were nearby or easily transported to the city as raw materials, and out of it as finished products. A second consideration, however, was from what the city would build and power its houses of production.

The city of Fall River in southeastern Massachusetts had two unique, naturally occurring advantages in this challenge: it sat along the Quequechan River, which fell 135 feet to Mount Hope Bay over the span of just one-quarter of a mile (indeed its name translates from Wampanoag as “falling or hopping river”, from which the city gets its name), and it sat atop a massive outcropping of some of the hardest granite in the New World, created through the collision of the two proto-continents that collided to form the North American plate 600 million years ago. From the river came power, and from the stone came building material. Together they permitted the construction of vast mills, whose pinkish hue – an identifying product of Fall River Granite’s high feldspar content – would come to dominate the city’s hilly landscape like a gleaming acropolis of industry.

Textile production was the city’s greatest output, but many others existed because with water and stone a mill for any purpose could be built. So omnipresent was Fall River Granite that mills were often built from stone quarried within their future footprint.

Civic monuments were also built from Fall River Granite; grand cathedrals, palatial schools, worldly train stations, commodious hospitals, impenetrable prisons, protective forts, and the mansions of the gods of industry spread throughout the city and the region from the shores of the Quequechan.

Just as it rose, Fall River would eventually fall. A lengthy period of tremendous prosperity stretching from about 1800 to 1920 would meet its demise as an overused Quequechan failed to keep up with the power provided by the centralized electricity grids quickly expanding across the nation.

Manufacturing followed cheaper labor and the postbellum resurgent population to the south, and new railroad routes made Fall River’s function as the land-sea node in a multi-modal route between Boston and New York irrelevant. The fall would be as unsparing and widespread as the rise. Mills closed and the meteoric growth of the population to 120,000 stagnated and then began to shrink just as the Quequechan had. The quarries filled with water and trash and became the sites of mysterious drownings.

On February 2nd, the Great Fire of 1928 spread through five blocks of the city like a death knell, destroying much of downtown. Starting at the Pocasset Mill, the fire tore through the city hollowing out mill buildings, leaving only their granite walls standing illuminated by the flames within like glowing exoskeletons. In 1959, through a misguided attempt to cauterize the city’s downfall, it was decided that Fall River would receive a new highway, I-195, and the massive Braga Bridge through the Federal Highway Act. The construction called for the demolition of many of the mills along the Quequechan’s banks, and for the canalization of the river itself into a 5-foot diameter tube, to be buried beneath the city only to emerge unceremoniously between two concrete footings of the newly constructed bridge at the base of the city’s hill.

Refusing to fade into anonymity, the end of Fall River’s end burned brighter than any moment in its history. For twenty years the city burned. Mill after mill fell victim to arson and accident, each one taking with it swaths of the surrounding city. The image of a granite wall standing alone against a much taller wall of orange flames left an indelible scar on the city’s culture. When, from 235 feet above the city, flames began to lap at the window frames of the south steeple of Notre Dame de Lourdes Church it was as though some silent Faustian bargain was coming due. A literal cathedral of Fall River Granite, the most visible surviving symbol of the city’s prime, burned with thick black smoke and bright red flames

as though being consumed by the fires of hell. When the fire department arrived, high winds had spread the flames to the rest of the neighborhood, and water only trickled from hydrants whose pressure had been reduced by the burying of the Quequechan.

Carpenters and clergy alike raced against time through the church attempting to preserve relics and records. The church a ruin, its walls of granite blocks stood stripped of all flammable materials as though they had just been quarried again. And so they would be.

In the ruins of the city, a new industry focused on Fall River Granite has arisen. Stone collected from the burned mills, the demolished monuments, is collected in vast yards, processed by size for resale or pulverized for concrete aggregate.

From facilities like Granite Reclaimed, stone can be bought as cobblestones to lend quaintness to the streets of historic neighborhoods, sliced and chemically polished into suburban kitchen countertops and retro hotel lobby floors, or – perhaps most poetically – cut and carved into pinkish grey tombstones, conspicuously plentiful as they dot the landscape of New England cemeteries. More hopeful alternate endings exist as well. Granite from Assonet Ledge largely escaped the narrative of Fall River. Most notably, like a small town actress headed to Broadway to make her grand debut, Assonet Ledge stone was shipped to New York Harbor, and was used to build Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island. When the United States celebrated its centennial and received a statue of Liberty Enlightening the World as a gift from France, the disused Fort Wood was selected as a suitably strong base because of the hardness of its granite. A pedestal was called for to raise high the statue so that those arriving from around the world might know that they would receive safe harbor from Lady Liberty. Once again Fall River supplied Assonet Ledge granite in order that it might match the stone of Fort Wood. Now, and for as long as America holds tight to its core principles, Liberty will always have a strong foundation in Fall River Granite.

nd pro v boston a

new

5

idence railroa d

railroad d har tford

yo rk, new haven, an

NEW YORK HARBOR

boston

prov ide nce

FALL RIVER

2

4 1

QU E

3

E CH

U

Q

WATTUPA POND

AN

MOUNT HOPE BAY

new

bed for d+

fal l

r iv er r

a ilroad

6

1mi 2mi

newp or t

new bedford

1.Beattie Quarry 2. Assonet Ledge Quarry 3.Metacomet Mill 4. Fall River Station/Bowenville Depot 5. Statue of Liberty (see inset) 6. Granite Reclaimed

SITES OF EXTRACTION

Images on opposite page: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1. A rail derrick moves stone, c. 1860 2. Laborers quarry stone at Assonet Ledge using the traditional nail hammering method, c. 1902 3. A search party hunts for a drowned body at Beattie Quarry, c. 1949 4. Granite blocks are moved via oxcart, c. 1884 5. The Quequechan River before canalization, c. 1929 6. Workers hoist a granite block out of the quarry via derrick, c. 1876 7. Workers stack granite slabs using a derrick.

8. The tube carrying the Quequechan before it was buried, c. 1956 9.Laborers quarry stone at Assonet Ledge, c. 1902

In the rise of Fall River, two quarries played a central role. The Beattie Quarry, located just north of the Quequechan near downtown, and the Assonet Ledge Quarry, tucked away in the forest eight miles north. Together, they produced two distinct diasporas of Fall River Granite. Beattie provide the stone for many of the city’s mills and monuments, while Assonet Ledge sent stone far and wide, to New York City, Newport, and Albany. The unique infrastructural conditions that surrounded each determined these divergent dispersals, and have left material results on the Fall River of today, even after two centuries of change.

Granite was quarried by hammering iron nails into the stone in a line; this would create a crack that allowed the stone to be pried away from the rock face with a lever and wedge. Then, derricks placed around the mill and anchored into the stone would hoist each massive block up and out of the quarry, to be placed on either an oxcart or on trains to be sent away. These two modes of transit would shape the city in unexpected ways. The city exists in two parts, downtown, which sits atop the granite hill, and the lowlands, a relatively flat coastal region below the granite bluff of the hill. The drop is 135 feet, and streets that lead to the lowlands were steeply sloped.

Should a tether have broken or an ox been spooked, a runaway oxcart on one of these streets would have proven calamitous for the city. Simply a broken cart wheel would have meant a 12 ton stone could have been stuck in the middle of the street until a mobile

derrick could be assembled on the site of the accident and moved the stone, possibly a process lasting weeks. Because of this, from the Beattie Quarry, though close to the lowlands as the crow flies, was never transported there. As a result, the lowlands are conspicuously absent of granite buildings, almost all mills there having been built in brick. A rare exception to this is the Metacomet Mill, which used granite quarried onsite from the bluff itself. This resulted in a rudimentary masonry because professionals did not quarry the stone, and so Metacomet Mill was made from chunks of rubble stone, held together by a concrete of thick aggregate.

As opposed to the Beattie Quarry, Assonet Ledge sat removed from the city, deep in the forest.

Rail lines were extended to it, and as a result its stone could be transported to the lowlands and the port.

From here stone was loaded onto barges and ferries, and sent south to Newport and New York for the construction of mansions and monuments. Rail access meant Assonet Ledge stone could go anywhere, and so it did. It was also sent north to build hospitals and asylums, prisons and schools throughout Bristol County. On rail, Assonet Ledge granite eventually made its way to Albany where it was used as the foundation and base of the New York State Capitol, and can still be identified by visitors by its pink hue and roughness, a haptic reminder that Fall River Granite is so hard that it could not be polished until chemical polishing became popular in the late 20th century.

Beattie Quarry | 1920 + 2018

ry railraoad ( r a u ab an tq do e n a sso n

ed)

ASSONET LEDGE LOOKOUT POINT

Assonet Ledge Quarry |1920 + 2018

3x3x12 was the standard block size for fall river granite

iron nails were hammered into stone to crack granite blocks in the quarry

3’

STANDARD BLOCK

MANIFESTATIONS

Images on opposite page: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1.The Bowenville Depot/Fall River Station 2. Plymouth Avenue granite mills 3. Chateau sur Mer, Newport, RI 4. Notre Dame de Lourdes Church, burned 1982 5. The Metacomet Mill before surrounding development 6. Fall River City Hall, demolished 1961 7. New York State Capitol, Albany, NY. 8. Fort Adams, Newport, RI 9.The Pocasset Mill, burned 1928 starting the Great Fire of 1928

Fall River’s granite produced, generally, two typologies of buildings: vast industrial mills and warehouses, and iconic monuments with highly specialized designs. While transporting Fall River Granite far from the city for industrial buildings was not cost effective, many iconic buildings far beyond the city’s limits called for Fall River granite, famed for its hardness and durability, and its pink hue. When Edmund Hitchcock, an early geologist and president of Amherst College wrote of Fall River granite in the 1841 Geological Survey of Massachusetts he praised it, saying “no rock can be finer for architectural purposes than the granite of Troy” (an early name for Fall River). Its strength made it popular for government buildings and forts, and its color was beloved by the architects of Newport mansions and the monumental civic buildings of Fall River. But its predominant usage, unquestionably, was in the 160 mills that sprung up throughout Fall River.

Three families were Fall River’s masters of industry: the Durfees, the Bowens, and the Bordens, the family whose name would live on in infamy after Lizzie Borden gained national celebrity for being accused of axe murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. The Durfee family oversaw most of the city’s shipping and ship building; the Bowens powered the city through a coal and steam company that also included control of shipping and rail charters; and the Bordens started their empire with a single grist mill and expanded it to include the production of

everything from paper and iron to textiles and gas.

Through the 19th-century these families manipulated the city’s granite into the city itself, building hundreds of mills and sponsoring the construction of many of the city’s most iconic buildings, the joint Borden and Durfee venture of Metacomet Mill playing a an especially important role as a symbol of the city’s prosperity.

As industry and purses grew, so did the city.

By 1890, Fall River was a city of 80,000 – the fortieth largest in a resurgent postbellum nation. By this time, two major train stations existed in the city, both primarily industrial depots with passenger service as a secondary function. The first was in the city’s lowlands, adjacent to Metacomet Mill and the sprawling American Printing Company and Fall River Iron Works that grew from it. Though its primary purpose was to bring in materials and take out goods, a stub of the rail line extended onto a pier, from which passengers aboard luxurious Fall River Line trains from Boston would disembark and board even more luxurious cruise liners for an overnight journey to New York. The other station ran along the Quequechan River in the east of the city near its source at Watuppa Pond and connected the mills there to New Bedford. By 1890, Fall River had outgrown these stations and it would be the Bowens that oversaw the construction of a new station near their steam and coal plants north of downtown.

METACOMET MILL

Material Matters

Source: Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress)

In 1847, Col. Richard Borden constructed the Metacomet Mill in Fall River’s lowlands in partnership with Maj. Bradford Durfee, the city’s leading shipwright. The mill straddled the base of the Quequechan River as it neared its outlet and served as the home of Borden’s Fall River Iron Works and later the American Printing Company. Based on English mills, the five-and-a-half story building was significant in the evolution of the city’s mill typology as the first to support its interior with iron columns: powerful marketing for the quality of Borden’s iron.

Metacomet’s site in the lowlands made transporting granite from the city’s main quarries difficult. Granite blocks were moved on oxcarts, which were dangerous to maneuver down the steep bluff that the city sits on. A broken wheel or runaway cart could wreak havoc and result in a heavy block stuck in the middle of city streets until a derrick could be set up to move it. Clever businessmen that they were, Borden and Durfee sited the mill as close to the bluff as possible and chipped away at it to get crude chunks of rubble stone from which to build the mill, the same process being used sixty years later when the mill was significantly expanded along with Borden’s industrial empire.

Metacomet Mill is now a remnant of the past: the locus of symbols of Fall River’s decline.

Adjacent to it is the remaining mouth of the buried Quequechan, emerging briefly and disappearing again beneath the mill only to reemerge unceremoniously in a heap of stone and trash 700 feet away. Highway overpasses, including the massive Braga Bride, surround the complex and the building itself has been repurposed as a “WOW! Work Out World”, its strong iron columns and solid granite walls supporting the heavy weights and machinery of a gymnasium, rather than those of a factory.

Metacomet Mill | 2018

early mills in fall river were built with rubble stone, crudely carved from the city’s large hill and joined with thick aggregate

2’

RUBBLE STONE

FALL RIVER STATION

The Granite Gateway

With limited passenger service at the city’s two main depots and its continued growth, a grand new station to properly serve and symbolize Fall River was called for in 1890. A site was selected north of downtown in the Bowenville neighborhood, so named for Joseph Bowen’s Bowen Coal Company, which powered the city and the mills that lay beyond the reach of the Quequechan. The site had the advantage of sitting along the Boston and Fall River Line, thereby creating easy access for residents to points north and west of the city, including Providence via Slade’s Ferry Bridge. Prolific railroad architect Bradford Gilbert was selected as

the station’s designer, and he set to work designing a station as grand as the city’s ambitions. Pink Fall River granite made up the majority of the building, accented by dark brown Milford granite and red Longmeadow sandstone. The station fronted onto a large square through which trolley lines passed to provide access to the entire city, including the city center a quarter mile to the south. The station was celebrated for housing specially designed ladies and gentlemen’s waiting rooms and modern toilets, a result of Joseph Bowen’s championing of hygienic infrastructure and a new waterworks system.

In 1930, an oil tanker struck the swinging

span of Slade’s Ferry Bridge that connected Fall River trains with Providence and the cities of Connecticut.

With the luxurious Boston-New York service already having been superseded by faster land routes, rail service to Bowenville was abandoned. The station was demolished in the 1950’s along with many of Joseph Bowen’s coal works, the Massasoit Steam Plant, and the neighboring McKinley Hotel. Today, a small park exists where the station had been, decorated with bushes and a granite Memorial Stone.

As the state has proposed returning rail access to Fall River the Bowenville site is being considered as a possible location for a new station.

Fall River Station | 1895

iconic monuments called for special stone forms, often carved from uniqule large stone blocks

SPECIAL PIECES

ALTERNATE ENDINGS

Images on opposite page: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1.Pocasset Mill burns, 1928 2. Ruins of Notre Dame des Lourdes Church, 1982 3. The Great Fire, 1928, with City Hall at right.

4. Flames engulf Notre Dame des Lourdes, 1982 5. Stone laying in wait at Granite Reclaimed, 2017 6. Statue of Libery surrounded by Fort Wood, 1912 7. The Great Fire, 1928 8. The Great Fire, 1928 9.Kerr Mill burns, 1987

Starting with the Great Fire of 1928, Fall River’s downfall was as precipitous as the hill it sits upon. Mill after mill closed and then burned, highways shredded the city, entombed the river, and called for the demolition of the city’s core including its granite City Hall. Monuments and rail lines were abandoned, ruined, and demolished.

The city’s population declined, its coffers hollowed like its buildings. But granite is a funny thing; it’s difficult to make go away. Even as the city faced its demise, the image of a mill’s granite walls standing resolute against a much taller wall of flames became a frequent sight on newspaper cover pages, scarring the city’s collective memory until it became immune to the pain like its nerves had been burnt away.

Ultimately the cinders went out, and there was just granite. Un-braced, the walls would eventually fall or be knocked over, transformed from ruin to rubble, yet still fundamentally unchanged.

Granite that escaped the city, however, escaped these fates; Assonet Ledge stone travelled far and wide by rail, finding its way to Newport, New York, Albany, in some cases becoming part of highly celebrated, internationally renowned monuments. Even some granite within Fall River is finding a more hopeful future. Metacomet Mill and the approximately 60 mills that remain have begun to find new purposes as gyms, apartments, and offices.

Increasingly, the Bowens, Durfees, and Bordens of the

modern industrial era who go by the names Bezos, Musk, and Buffett, are interested in what these spaces have to offer, and with good reason. Granite buildings represent very tangible investments of time, effort, and resources, and once quarried, granite is difficult to get rid of except by returning it to the ground. Granite mill buildings lend themselves readily to second and third lives and their increasing rarity raises the value of each one that survives.

In most cases, however, the ruins of Fall River’s granite buildings are re-quarried.

Companies have been set up in the footprints of former buildings or adjacent to them, or in a few significant cases at some distance from the city itself, and workers set about cataloging, categorizing, and organizing the sizes and shapes of stones to be repurchased as is or broken down for other uses, such as aggregate for concrete. Smaller stone sizes and modern transportation methods means that through facilities like these, the diaspora of Fall River granite is growing ever wider, if more diffuse, extending to sites and cities with very different narratives than Fall River’s. Through this second quarrying, these stones may have lives that last much longer than their first.

Ultimately, quarrying granite is an indelible mark.

Once extracted, stone cannot be reunified into the ground, even it is returned to it. Our mark on this material will long outlast our time, but its mere presence will preserve our legacy.

LADY LIBERTY

Liberty’s Footing

In 1800, New York State ceded Bedloe’s Island to the US Government to be used in conjunction with Governor’s and Ellis Islands to protect New York City. The island had previously been a farm and quarantine area for the sick, but as the War of 1812 loomed a fort was needed to defend the city. The fort was to be an 11-pointed star with 30 guns, capable of sustaining heavy artillery. Fall River granite was the logical choice to ensure such strength. Assonet Ledge granite was ordered because it could be transported by rail to Fall River’s port, from where it was barged to Bedloe’s Island, and a short rail line moved to its final destination. The fort survived the War of 1812, was named for Lt. Col. Elenzer Wood who had not, and a garrison was built.

When France gave a massive statue of Liberty Enlightening the World to the United States to celebrate its centennial, Bedloe’s Island was chosen for its symbolic location and because the then-decommissioned Fort Wood’s walls of Fall River granite would be able to bear the statue’s 225-tons.

To farther raise Lady Liberty so that her light might illume all of New York Harbor a 112-foot pedestal was needed. The pedestal had to match the pinkness of Fort Wood’s granite, so Assonet Ledge was once again called upon. Completed by 1886, the pedestal used a steel frame to reduce its weight, and was clad in relatively thin sheets of ornately carved Fall River granite.

Bedloe’s Island has now become Liberty Island, the garrison buildings replaced by visitor centers and gift shops, the piers used for tourist ferries rather than barges and naval ships. Even Lady Liberty has changed, her once-gleaming copper oxidizing into its iconic green, but her foundations and ideals remain sure and strong as the stone she stands on.

Bedloe’s Island | 1912

the statue of liberty’s pedestal is only clad with granite. a steel skeleton holds up blocks of varying sizes

1’

CLADDING BLOCK

THE STONE CEMETERY

Granite Graveyard

About halfway between Fall River and New Bedford sits Granite Reclaimed, unassumingly operated out of a few trailers. Beyond these, however, is a massive yard filled with the entire history of Fall River. When the city’s mills and churches burned, and City Hall and other buildings were torn down to make way for highways, Granite Reclaimed and companies like it quarried their ruins and collected the surviving stone, largely unharmed by the fires. The stone is processed by size, some crushed for concrete aggregate, some broken down into cobblestones for the restoration of streets in historic neighborhoods, and some left as is, waiting

for someone to purchase them in all their massive glory, or to slice and polish them into countertops.

These facilities offer the stone a second quarrying, another chance to matter.

Granite Reclaimed’s collection is a vast and growing store yard of every shape and size of granite block. The yard reads like a cemetery of the city; “Here lies the pediment of City Hall. 1843-1962”, or “Here lay the arches of Notre Dame, burned but unharmed, now brought into life anew. 1906-1982”. The yard is a sad sort of poetry: the oxcarts that once hauled the stone through the city replaced by large trucks, hauling the same stone. The rail line that hugs the

yard made the site an ideal location to bring in stone, until the rail line itself was abandoned. A short walk along it brings you to Mid-City Scrap, where old rail cars are broken down for parts, just like the stone they once transported to the graveyard nearby.

But stone dies hard. The most common reuse for Granite Reclaimed’s stone is as tombstones: graves that mark graves. As we pulled them from the solid ground and broke them down to build our fleeting collective monuments, these stones will become eternal individual monuments overseeing our passage into the ground. There they will ever stand, watching over the space they made for us.

fal l

r iv er evergreen cemetery

OLD FALL RIVER ROAD

new bedfo rd

sh

ing

sland r i ve r le i

cut river copi GRANITE RECLAIMED

n ew

100ft

rd o f d e b

fal

ilroad (abandoned) a r ver l ri

Stone Cemetery | 2018 200ft

3’

3’

1. cobblestone

5. quarried block

1’

1’

6. cladding block

1

2. structural block

3’ 3’

2 6

3. arches

5

7. slab

3 7

4

8

2’

4. specialized 100ft

200ft

8. field stone

FALL RIVER GRANITE

1. Fall River Herald News, Fall River Granite is City’s Foundation. October 17, 1978.

2. Dion, Marc, Hills, Mills & History, South Coast Today, March 24, 2014 SITES OF EXTRACTION

1.Moniz, William A. Quarry days: Fall River built with granite

2. Moniz, William A. Granite, Grit, and Grace: An Exploration of the Fascinating Side Streets of Fall

River’s History”. Fall River Historical Society, 2017.

MANIFESTATIONS

1.Adams, R & J, Hoyt’s Fall River Directory. Sampson, Davenport, & Co. 1880, p. 18

2. Berg, Walter Gilman, Buildings and Structures of American Railroads: AReference Book for

Railroad Managers, Superintendents, Master Mechanics, Engineers, Architects, and Students. J. Wiley

& Sons, 1893. p. 30-311

3. Devitt, Phil, Becoming Bowenville: Forgotten name, place unite for something good. South Coast Today.

March 13, 2013

4. Gray, Christopher, The ArchitectWho Turned A Railroad Bridge on Its Head, New York Times. July

1, 2007 ALTERNATE ENDINGS

1. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Public Documents of Massachusetts,Volume 4. 1876.

2. Koorey, Stefani. Fall River Revisited, Arcadia Publishing, 2012. p. 89-95

3. Trainweb.com. Fort Wood/Bedloe’s Island, February 16, 2012. http://members.trainweb.com/ bedt/milrr/ftwood.html IMAGES

All images sourced from DigitalCommonwealth.com, unless otherwise noted.

“Stone Cemetery” images courtesy of Granite Reclaimed, North Dartmouth, MA.

SOURCES