When he was 70 years old in early 1980, C.E. ”Dick” Hayes stopped by the Bybee Stone Co. in Ellettsville, Ind., to see an old friend who was a master carver, the last one working full-time in the limestone business of southern Indiana. Hayes knew the man from the old days, when Hayes himself had been a master carver, chiseling formless rock into grand curlicues, columns, capitals, frescoes and traceries to grace some of the nation`s most famous buildings.
At that time, in 1980, Hayes hadn`t put a chisel to stone for 18 years. Lack of business in the stone industry had turned him out of the mills in 1962, and he had been making a living as a carpenter as best he could in and around Bloomington, Ind., and down in Florida. In stopping at the Bybee mill, Hayes hoped for nothing more than to swap a few reminiscences with his old friend, to catch up on news of other old-timers. But when his carver friend asked Hayes what he was doing with himself, the question wasn`t merely rhetorical.
”I told him I was just loafing around,” Hayes says. ”He told me to go home and get my tools. There was lots of work to be done and nobody around who knew how to do it. I went home and got my tools and brought them back here that same day. Put `em up on the shelf over there, and there they are. I`m still using `em every day, 10 years later.”
At the age of 80, Hayes works full-time as a stone carver, a craft he began as a teenage apprentice in 1927. The limestone business has picked up so well that the ranks of carvers, the aristocracy of the stone trades, are filling up with young men. Hayes` boss at Bybee is just 27 years old, and the other five carvers at the mill are all young enough to be his grandsons.
Indeed, after a quarter century of poor business or no business at all, a dozen quarrying companies in Indiana`s ”stone country” have for the last few years had trouble keeping up with demand. New quarry holes are opening, old holes are being reopened and enlarged. Farm boys, as they did a century ago, again are abandoning the hollows and hardscrabble farms of southern Indiana to become quarrymen, working as hookers, breakers and drillers.
A dozen stone milling companies in the area are humming along nicely again, too, luring young carpenters, men who already have a practiced eye and are adept with tools, into becoming stone cutters and carvers. The mills, housed in cavernous buildings roaring with the sounds of gigantic saws, lathes, cranes and pneumatic hammers and chisels, take in 15-ton blocks of limestone yanked from the ground by the quarrymen at one end. At the other end, the stone comes out cut, chiseled or otherwise sculpted into graceful pieces of building material.
Dick Hayes says he knows it`s slightly ridiculous for him to be working full-time at his age. He acknowledges he is not the fastest worker in the mill anymore, and he asked not to be assigned to carve any truly large pieces of ornamentation anymore, as he is not up to it physically. He has discussed the possibility of retiring, but his young coworkers and his employers don`t want him to go. He`s got the know-how of the craft that only decades of experience can teach, and he`s the only man in the shop who possesses that knowledge.
”He can tell you just about anything you want to know about stone,”
says Bill Galloway. At 35, Galloway is the next oldest carver to Hayes at Bybee. He is still an apprentice, however, with just two years in the trade, having been an art student, sculptor and carpenter before Bybee hired him.
”You have to see three-dimensionally when you are going to carve a piece of stone into an object,” Galloway says. ”It isn`t easy to do or to learn. You have to think pretty hard, at least at first, where and how you are going to cut into a blank stone to chisel out an ornate scroll or whatever. But if you get into trouble, Dick Hayes will get you out of it. He has done it all before. He`s like an encyclopedia of knowledge when it comes to stone and how to work it. The trouble is, nobody ever wrote a book on that sort of knowledge. It`s all oral, passed on by word-of-mouth from one generation of craftsmen to the next.”
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If all that sounds a bit old-worldly, the limestone industry in Indiana indeed harkens back to an Old World, European way of doing business. It is almost like an oligarchy, with pretty much the same families owning the businesses for generations, sometimes employing a workforce that has been with the same family firms for generations.
That is perhaps appropriate for an industry that supplies architects and builders who still like to do things the old-fashioned way, leaving their imprints etched in stone.
Indiana quarries are supplying the stone for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., for example, and also quarried the stone for some of the capital city`s most classic, monumental buildings, such as the Pentagon and the Justice, Labor and Commerce Departments. Indiana limestone, too, is what built some of the most famous and architecturally important edifices in other American cities. In New York, there is the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the United Nations headquarters, to name a few. In Chicago you can list the Museum of Science and Industry, Tribune Tower, Union Station and the Civic Opera House, and you haven`t even scratched the surface.
The limestone industry`s fortunes wax and wane with the elemental tides of history, totally dependent on two factors: the national economy and architectural fashion. The industry was shut down during the two world wars when the nation went on a total wartime economic footing to produce war-related materials, precluding nearly all major civilian construction. It was virtually shut down again during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when little major construction was undertaken nationwide.
What had driven Dick Hayes out of the stone business for 18 years was Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and the so-called Bauhaus school of architecture. By the 1950s, the slick, lean, shiny towers of glass, steel, cement and aluminum that the Bauhaus` International Style of architecture represented had pretty much supplanted all other architectural styles when it came to putting up office buildings.
The Miesian vision of a simple oblong box standing on end began to be replicated on block upon urban block in cities throughout the world. It didn`t matter that the vision, repeated endlessly and with little visible variation, was cold, sterile and downright inhuman. The International Style was relatively cheap and easy to erect, so it was popular. Certainly it was cheaper than putting up stone buildings, not to mention buildings dressed with ornate stone sculpture.
Thus, by 1955 the quarries and mills in south central Indiana`s limestone belt, a narrow, 23-mile-long strip that stretches from Bloomington to Bedford, fell on hard times. By the late 1970s, when times were hardest, more than half the area`s quarry and milling companies had permanently gone out of business. Most of them, like the companies that survived, were old, family-owned businesses that had been in existence a century or more.
If there isn`t much demand for limestone as a construction material, as was the case in the 1960s and `70s, the Indiana limestone industry is pretty much moribund. The stone quarried from the Indiana belt is perhaps the best limestone in the world for construction purposes. It is, alas, not much good for anything else.
Softer than granite and marble, it doesn`t weather well enough to be used for purposes other than construction, such as cemetery headstones, walkways or stairsteps. Because of its consistency, it isn`t very well suited for crushing into gravel. It could be ground to a fine dust to be used in chicken and animal feed, as it is about 98 percent pure calcium carbonate, but the process is too expensive to be feasible.
Stone-granite, marble and limestone-is enjoying a great revival in popularity as a construction material, thus accounting for the revival of fortunes in Indiana`s stone belt. The 1980s have been prosperous times for business in general. Corporate tycoons, real estate moguls and institutional bigwigs of the `80s have been bullish about putting up new corporate headquarters. Faced with deciding on the design of new buildings, they have had their appetites whetted for edifices somewhat more deliciously elegant than lookalike Miesian boxes.
Architects have responded with an era of post-modernism, a style that derives heavily from architectural fashions of the 1920s, both in neoclassical and Art Deco styles. Those styles demand heavy use of stone in their design, and Indiana limestone is often the material preferred by architects. In Chicago the most recent and spectacular example of the ”new” style is the NBC Tower on the north bank of the Chicago River east of the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
”I think there is more money around,” says F.G. Summitt, president of Harding and Cogswell Corp. in Bedford, one of the larger, more innovative milling operations in the industry. ”There are bigger budgets available when people are putting up buildings nowadays, and more competition, in that developers feel they must achieve a high degree of quality in buildings to attract tenants. There`s a different mentality in the 1980s, one demanding quality and luxury, and in buildings, ours is a quality material.”
Compared to the peak years of quarrying in the 1920s, when about 14 million cubic feet of stone was mined annually, the quarries now produce about 4 million cubic feet, says Summitt. A dapper, cosmopolitan man, Summitt is a rarity in that he rose to the top of the mill he runs without having a connection to family ownership.
He does, however, have family ties to the place. Several years ago he had his staff gather the scattered files of the mill, founded in 1913, to form a company archive. In pulling the files together, he discovered that the company stopped paying its employes in cash and started issuing payroll checks in 1923. And the first check issued, $44.55 for the week of Sept. 1, 1923, was to Kearney Summitt.
”He was my grandfather,” says Summitt, who proudly shows off the check to visitors. ”He was the superintendent of production at this mill in those days.”