Berea Sandstone in the Garfield home and farm buildings in Mentor, Ohio

Where did the stone in President Garfield's farm buildings come from? Nobody at James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, can say for sure. A park ranger's article, the second of two on the Berea Sandstone found in the site's buildings, shows where the stone appears and what the files do and do not reveal.

A stone industry

Amherst, in Lorain County, Ohio, had a booming stone industry, with its first quarry opening in the late 1840s. It was known as the sandstone center of the world and had some of the largest quarries; Buckeye Quarry is said to have been over 200 feet deep. Berea Sandstone became a very popular dimension stone sometime in the 1850s. Many structures in the Western Reserve area use it, including Old Stone Church and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Public Square and Squire's Castle in Willoughby Hills.

The Garfield buildings

The Garfields bought their family farm in Mentor in 1876. President Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and his wife Lucretia was left to look after the family and manage the farm. Over the years she oversaw many changes to the property, including the buildings that use Berea Sandstone.

The carriage house, built in 1893. Berea Sandstone ashlar shows on the bases of its columns. NPS.

• Carriage house (1893). Built to house the property's horses and carriages as part of Lucretia Garfield's transformation of the farm into a country estate. It is now the site's visitor center, with the auditorium and exhibits where carriages and stalls once were. The bases of its exterior columns are Berea Sandstone ashlar, square-cut stone often used to face brick or stone, with typical features such as small rust-colored spots and horizontal bedding marked by color.
• Gasholder (1885). Natural gas had been discovered on the property in 1882. The structure is faced entirely in ashlar laid in parallel horizontal courses, and was later modified and made part of the carriage house. Lucretia Garfield used the gas for heating, cooking and lighting in the main house.
• Windmill (1894). She had it built to replace an older windmill, with a new well, tower and storage tank, to supply running water to the house. The 62-foot windmill has a Berea Sandstone base and a wood-framed tower. The original tower and windmill were damaged and taken down in 1939, and the present ones were restored in 1998 thanks to an anonymous donor; the stone base dates to 1894. While it was going up she consulted her youngest son Abram, then an architecture student at M.I.T. A letter to him of June 17, 1894 says the arches were finally finished after one had been taken down three times and another twice, and implies the contractor would have benefited from more schooling, a sign of how highly she valued education.
• The family home's addition (1885-86). She added a memorial library in memory of her late husband, with a fireproof vault that held his papers until they were sent to the Library of Congress beginning in the 1930s. A Cleveland architect, Forrest A. Coburn, designed it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style popular in the late nineteenth century, whose hallmark is the use of stone. Here the ashlar is in random courses, unlike the gasholder's.

The ashlar at the base of the carriage house columns. NPS.

The gasholder, faced with Berea Sandstone ashlar. NPS.

The windmill: base of Berea Sandstone, arches of sandstone blocks and the rest ashlar. NPS.

The 1885-86 addition to the Garfield home, looking south. NPS.

The unanswered question

Which quarries Lucretia Garfield bought the stone from is speculation. The site's copy of the "Mason's Specifications" for the memorial library addition says the stone was to come from a "local" quarry and names none. The only other stone receipt in the files is dated April 7, 1904, years after the structures were built, for cut stone from the Malone Stone Company of Cleveland, whose offices were in the Garfield Building in Cleveland, which may be one reason she chose it over rivals. The ranger concludes that the quarries may never be known, but the stone and its industry were part of the growth of northeast Ohio and can be seen in the buildings that survive.

Sources

• National Park Service, Garfield Rocks! (Part II), an article by a park ranger at James A. Garfield National Historic Site, April 2017, for the Garfield Telegraph; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The stone-company receipt photo, credited jointly with a historical society, is left out.