A Serendipitous Stone Wall

Serendipity, Part 1

*Stonemason Gary Jones. Photo: Juno Lamb*

“In 1996,” stonemason Gary Jones recounts, “my mom’s mom went blind, so my mom went back to England. My parents’ plan was that my dad would finish his work, and they’d retire back there. In October of 1999, my dad rented a house in Alton, New Hampshire, for a week, and my mom flew over, and we proceeded to drive to different areas from there. One day, the last day, we drove up 16, and came up over that hill, and saw that mountain, and my father took a left, and we found this beautiful little wooden bridge. I’d never been there before, didn’t even know the name of the mountain. And I took photographs, and they were the last photographs I ever took of my parents in America together.”

For thousands of years before the Jones family found their way to Chocorua that October day, humans have crested what is now called Heavenly Hill, just south of Chocorua Lake, and been met by some version of a view that earns the term “breathtaking”—Little Lake and Chocorua Lake gleaming down below, and, rising up behind the lakes, the long shoulder and stony peak of Mount Chocorua. Now, the view has an embellishment: a stone wall so in keeping with the vernacular that it might have been here for generations, and so well-built that it will be here for generations to come. A wall made not with mortar to hold it together, but with skill, deep knowledge, and a respect for gravity Gary Jones has developed over a lifetime of learning and practice.

The forces* that came together to make this wall possible at this time and in this place span continents and centuries, with a pinch of Chocorua serendipity to hold them all together.

You could say it comes down to geology, to soil that even after hundreds of years of rock-clearing still finds more stones to churn up to the surface in every spring thaw. Or to the many immigrants who came to this place, bringing a diversity of masonry skills from across the British Isles and beyond. To the apprenticeship system. To Gary Jones’ great-aunt in Liverpool, who took a liking to a Yankee soldier during the war and married him, and to Jones’ father, who got “a bee in his bonnet to come to America” as soon as he met this Yankee uncle. To stonemason Gary Jones’ dislike for working in a windowless center office after he’d gotten a taste of working outdoors. To Chocorua serendipity.

It’s all these things.

Stony New England

The rocks play a starring role. The first stone walls in New England were walls of consumption. Settlers needed a place for all the upturned rocks and boulders as they cleared fields for farming. And, like much in our historical record, our image of hardy colonists subduing the wilderness with brawn and grit, and lugging all those rocks into place, isn’t the whole picture. According to Susan Allport, in her book Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York, many stone walls were built by Native Americans, slaves, indentured servants, and children.

The quantity and weight of all these rocks accounts for the small field size in New England. It was easier to wall in eight one-acre fields than to haul the rocks the distances required to build one eight-acre field. This contributed to the destruction of New England farms in the latter half of the 19th century, Jones says. Mechanized tools needed a larger turn radius than was possible in a small field. “You’ve got a couple of acres, and you can’t turn this newfangled thing that they got, and you’re like, they’re giving land away out in Iowa, and word is you can pull two miles in one direction!”

*The Basin View Lot wall before it was a wall, in early May. Photo: Juno Lamb*

As farming went west, city-dwellers of means began to see a value in recreation in nature, and the early tourism industry grew. People buying land in rural areas for summer camps and houses wanted nicer, more decorative walls near their houses, so some walls became what Jones calls “walls of affluence.” All that settling and farming had left its mark, though. By the later decades of the 1800s, Jones says, 256,000 miles of stone walls crisscrossed New England and into New York. And through all this time, successive waves of immigrants brought their own skills and flair to the work.

Then, in the mid-’60s, Jones himself arrived on these shores, and in the end, had as thorough an apprenticeship here as any young Welsh or Irish stonemason’s son might have had. His first teacher, starting when Jones was in college, was Jim Maloney, “a former union mason,” who gave him a “great fundamental education in the masonry business.” Next came John Lewis, of Welsh descent. And then Henry Varian, an “Irishman from Cork.”

The Way of the Bulldog

According to Jones, Jim Maloney was “like a tenacious bulldog.” He was a union mason, “a production guy...he did the best job he could the fastest he could for the client, but he wouldn’t step back and ask ‘what are we doing here?’ instead he would just push forward, and we’d get the job done.” From him Jones learned the fundamentals, like making mortar correctly and setting up a job. “It was absolutely invaluable, like a boot camp, and he would tease me often. As I got better I would do more, and he’d look over, and say, ‘Gar, it ain’t the Taj Mahal,’ because I would be painstakingly trying to put every ounce of my being into doing a single joint or something.”

The Way of the Turtle

“Then I worked for John Lewis,” Jones says. “His grandfather was a Welsh mason in Massachusetts, so that’s where he learned. He just seemed to have the most laid-back blasé attitude, he’d sit there and smoke a cigarette for ten minutes and talk to you, but he had this incredible ability to plan for the future, and to set the job up. He could put the dump truck up on top of the staging, to deliver the bricks, so we didn’t have to carry them. He had this way of managing that made things very easy. I called his way the ‘way of the turtle,’ because it wouldn’t look like we were doing anything, but he would blast ‘em up. He was just as fast as Maloney in the end, he just had a different manner.”

The Way of the Musician

Jones’ third teacher, Henry Varian, “had started his apprenticeship when he was 12, in Cork, Ireland. His father was a mason, and his grandfather was a mason, and his two brothers, Liam and Jimmy, were also masons. Henry was the first to come over. When he came over at 19 years old on a ship from Liverpool to Boston, he’d already done a full apprenticeship for seven years. He also played guitar and banjo, and he brought those with him. He got into Boston and he went straight to Copley Square, where he played guitar, made five bucks, and thought, ‘I have arrived. This place is something else.’” By the time Jones met Varian, he had owned a prominent construction company in Brookline, started the first Irish pub in Boston, performed there, tossed his masonry tools off the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River when the pub was doing well, and followed flamenco dancing around the world after the recessions of the early 1980s destroyed the pub business. In the late 1980s, Varian bought a house on Nantucket, where Jones met him. “He came back into the masonry game,” Jones says, “because there was a lot of work there, and that’s where I met him and went to work for him, and I’m so blessed that I did, the guy taught me so much. I’d had this good basic understanding of masonry, but he had the European eye, and he taught me a lot about style—a great education because his knowledge was so vast. His way was much softer, almost like a dance. He wasn’t your typical mason, he was a musician, he had an air of culture about him. He taught me how to tune it in, to not be afraid to make it the way you think it should be made, to take the time. He used to say, ‘Ah, Gar, gone are the days when a man with a bit of string could build an entire city block.’”

“Masonry is an odd thing,” Jones says. “It takes an odd mix of grit, artistic flair, a kind of dogged, stubborn determination. It’s a strange formula for a personality. Only one or two out of every twenty men that have come through my tutelage have gone on to become masons. When I started, I wasn’t planning to do it forever. But when I went and worked inside buildings after I had done masonry for four years in college, as soon as I got inside..the first thing I noticed was that the windows don’t open. I’d already been on top of the staging on a beautiful autumn morning, with the mist rising from the grass, and it was just two different worlds. Everyone’s like, it’s a great job, you don’t want to give up a job like that [working in database development for a competitor of Microsoft’s Access]. When I went back to work for Maloney for $15 bucks an hour, everyone thought I was out of my mind, and I thought I was out of my mind. I was trying to feel comfortable that I made the right decision, and I still had a long way to go before I was comfortable working for myself.”

The Basin View Lot Wall

*Lines of string run to show the height and width of the wall. Photo: Juno Lamb*

“Henry Varian taught me the importance of string,” Jones says, “and using string, even to tell the customer, this is what it’s going to look like. I do it all with string.” First is a string coming down from a top point, a cleat or piece of wood with a nail in it. “They call it being hung by a dead man,” Jones says, “like someone’s holding the string...and then we pull the string down to the ground and you lay the corner to the string.” Before he laid a single stone at the Basin View Lot, he says, “I set the top of that wall up in strings and said, look, this is going to be the top.”

*Lowering a boulder into place. Photo: Juno Lamb*

Various factors made the Basin View Lot wall challenging. “Number one,” Jones says, “was the size of the boulders. You don’t realize how big they are, because they’re in the wall now, but I set the boulders with a particular technique and I use a little gadget that you never see in the end, and I went through 400 of these little drop-ins that allow me to pick up a big boulder with my tractor like I was picking it up with my fingers. So that means 400 tractor placements of these boulders that weighed four or five hundred pounds apiece. If you went and measured the boulder, you’d be amazed, because granite weighs 160-166 pounds per cubic foot. In the end I calculated that the whole wall weighs 308,000.6 pounds, or 154 tons.”

Another challenge, particular to dry stone walls, is that the wall had to be self-supporting. “It had to stay there, in other words, and gravity has to be the medium that holds it together, so there are techniques that I use to make that happen.” From May, a month that included snow and sweltering temperatures, through our long, hot, dry summer, Jones worked on the wall with help from his crew: Pat Shea, a full journeyman mason that Jones has worked with on and off for twenty-five years; Eric Dube, who’s worked with him for several years now; and his son Liam Jones, a level one certified dry stone waller.

The work requires judgment and patience. “One of my favorite things to do is the dry stone wall because that’s really the extreme of managing chaos, because the stones don’t even have a uniform shape, they’re just literally oblong or round, and you have to somehow tease a structure out of it. That’s the greatest challenge with dry stone work,” Jones says. “That build was a four month challenge. But you just keep going every day, and in a few weeks, oh, we can move on to this next section, and you wrap up a particular run of wall, and all of a sudden you’re at the top where it slows down again because you have to get the height somewhat uniform, with all sorts of round boulders. It was a grueling four months, but I’m very happy. That particular spot, the bridge and the mountain, have a special meaning for me.”

Serendipity, Part 2

In 1999, Jones was ready to leave Nantucket, his home of a dozen years. “I came off island three times,” Jones says, “and rented a car, and drove to NH. I asked John Lewis, who was from North Conway, ‘Where would you live?’ He said, ‘I’d look in Tamworth or Sandwich if I had to do it all over again.’” Jones looked at a place in Sandwich, and on his next trip north, looked at another place. “And then the third time, this thing came on the market, this little cabin on eight acres on Washington Hill in someplace called Chocorua. I saw the cabin and said this is it.

*The Narrows Bridge seen from the Basin View Lot this autumn. Photo: Alex Moot*

“One day I drove down MacGregor Hill Road to get to 16, and I drove around the corner, and there it was. I’m within a mile of it, you couldn’t get closer, of the last place I took a picture of my parents when they were in America. It was just so magical. Chocorua has always been really blessed for me. I can’t even tell you how goofy the whole serendipitous nature of the thing is. I got the job at the view 20 years from the year I bought the place. To celebrate my anniversary in Chocorua, to do the wall in the view, has been an honor, and very magical for me. An unexpected fortuitous event. But I think Chocorua is a serendipity machine. I think Tamworth is. It’s very magical here. But you know, you’ve got to have the eyes for it.”

*In addition to everyone for whom we share our gratitude in our 2020 Fall/Winter Newsletter.

Banner: A portion of the newly-completed wall in the Basin View Lot this autumn. Photo: Alex Moot