THE EGG AND I Photos by Sarah Huntington
T
By Drew Babb
he egg is a cairn. No, not Toto, the Cairn Terrier in The Wizard of Oz. This cairn is an old-world-inspired pile of stones that commemorate or memorialize or just looks stunning on a Fauquier foothill.
Lewis Whitesell stands by his cairn.
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The “I” (of the egg and…) is Lewis Whitesell, legendary in these parts for his stonewalls and chimneys and cabins. But for this tour-de-force he wielded a decidedly artistic sledge and trowel to build a couple of cairns for his patron, Mark Ohrstrom, on Ohrstrom’s farm near The Plains. The Egg is eight feet tall. Took 28 days to craft. The core is hollow but there’s a center post to keep Whitesell (and his son Ryan, a co-creator), well, centered. The secret sauce may have been precisely sized cut-out templates fashioned from Pink Panther Owens-Corning insulation that guided his sublime gradating and undulating egg.
Go Green Middleburg | Holiday 2020
