The image above,
from about 1888,
shows one of the
many stiles used to
cross over the stone
walls surrounding
the campus. Elisha
Mitchell, right, was
a New Englander
who knew his rocks;
he’s considered the
father of Carolina’s
stone walls.
Previous pages: A
dry-stacked wall
near the Old Chapel
Hill Cemetery.
and crannies and sprout wildflowers in
their seams.
From the beginning, people admired
the walls, and, by the early 1900s, families
in Chapel Hill were building stone walls
around their homes and gardens. When the
supply of rocks on campus dwindled,
workers found more along farm roads and
clearings, where farmers had plowed up
stones and dumped them into windrows.
If finding the material was easy, the
labor of building was not. Chatham stone
weighs approximately 125 pounds per
cubic foot, and a good building stone can
be 200 pounds or more. Masons needed
physical strength, an engineer’s instinct for
structure and form, and an artist’s eye for
The Review
regularly
explores
Carolina’s sense
of place.
This story
is part of an
ongoing walk
around the
campus that
includes
“Pillars of
Wisdom,”
about Carolina’s
columns, from
September/
October 2008;
“Worn Pages,
Tough Spine,”
Wilson Library’s
story, from
January/
February 2009;
“In the Grove,”
about campus
trees, from
July/August
2009;
“The Beloved
Unknown,”
about the Old
Chapel Hill
Cemetery,
in May/June
2010;
and “Body
of Work”
about public
art, from
September/
October 2010.
