SET IN STONE
deceptively simple — until you’ve tried
building one, as Coleman has, at her home
in Chatham County. Workers excavate
through turf and roots down to undisturbed soil and then lay a row of the largest,
flattest stones available, making a bed for the
courses above. Experienced masons try to
cross each joint with one stone so that vertical seams don’t weaken the wall. Every
few feet, they lay a long stone across the
depth of the wall, tying the front to the
back. And throughout, they rely on gravity,
never setting a stone to rest on a surface
that slopes away from the center of the
wall. A well-chosen stone locks into its bedding stones, transferring its weight straight
downward, and it does not wobble.
2000, uncovered fresh supplies of rock for
wall building but also took a toll. “Some of
the walls I loved the best are now gone,”
Coleman says. “And a lot of our stone walls
have been altered or moved or repaired.
But there are still some nice walls, ones that
haven’t been disturbed in a long time.”
Among the older examples, her
favorites include the dry-stacked wall along
Raleigh Street on the arboretum side and
the wall that borders the president’s house,
on the corner of Raleigh and Franklin. She
also likes the mortared walls along Raleigh
Street, those along Country Club and the
entire Forest Theatre area.
She is pleased with some of the most
recent work, including the Carolina Alumni
Memorial between Phillips and Memorial
halls, where Lincoln Hassell, a mason from
Raleigh, artfully deconstructed a neatly
built wall into a row of strewn boulders.
And Coleman and Smith are both proud of
their collaboration on the Eve Carson
Memorial Garden, constructed directly
behind the Campus Y using ideas from stu-
dents and stones from Carson’s home state
of Georgia. In both cases, Coleman says, the
walls fit the purpose and the site.
