continued from page 25
to find, Coleman says. “As the supply gets
lean, the character of the walls does change.”
Smitty Smith orders much of his stone
from a supplier who tries to match, as
closely as possible, the look of Chatham
stone. “We have gone to another rock that’s
called the East Blend,” Smith says. “But on
the old campus, we’re trying to continue to
use the native stones, which are chunky
and round. The East Blend is sort of flat.”
Smith also uses stone unearthed in local
quarries that supply decomposed granite, a
gritty material known locally as Chapel Hill
gravel. “In a pit like that, you can get several
different colors,” Smith says. “The rocks have
crevices, and when the water runs through
the cracks, it changes the color, so when you
break them out at the quarry, you get a nice,
flat surface that can be red, gray or brown.
Rocks are peculiar. They run a color gamut.
When we build, we blend them.”
JOCK LAUTERER ’67/NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION
Families of stone
As the rocks have changed, so have the
masons. During the 1990s, when contractors began to hire Hispanic crews, workers
brought their cultural preferences with
them. Several walls along Manning Drive,
built before Coleman arrived on the job,
diverge from the campus style. “The size of
the stone is very different,” Coleman says,
“and the walls have a different character.
You even find rocks set vertically, something you just don’t see in the older walls.”
Smith employs Hispanic workers on his
crew, and Coleman has asked him to
ensure that his masons learn and respect
the traditional patterns. In her view, walls in
different parts of campus don’t have to
look exactly the same, but they should
share a family resemblance, as they did
when successive generations of families
built them. Weather and time assist with
the blending, because a new stone wall
soon develops a patina.
beautiful. And those old walls were a great
tourist attraction, because no one was
building them that way anymore. You can
still find walls without mortar in some
parts of campus, but in other places, I think
people have forgotten. The old walls are a
piece of history.”
But for people who have spent decades
admiring the walls, for their history as well
as their rugged good looks, the new walls
do not compare to the old. If Bill Friday,
for one, had his way, Carolina would drop
the mortar and keep the walls old school.
“During my 30-year term, I don’t know of
any that were built with mortar,” Friday
says. “People learned how to rotate the
stones to get the right fit. The results were
Smitty Smith builds what the University
requests, but he likes the old ways, too. In
2009, he traveled to the Mediterranean and
saw the ruins of Pompeii. He was fascinated by the masonry there, just as he was
when he first saw the castles of Europe. He
admires walls that have stood for centuries,
held together by craftsmanship and gravity
alone.
A stone wall was central at a
notable moment in Chapel Hill
history in March 1966, when
Student Body President Paul
Dickson ’66, right, stood on the
Franklin Street sidewalk and
introduced Frank Wilkinson, who
had invoked the Fifth
Amendment before the House
Un-American Activities
Committee, to an audience
standing on campus during the
Speaker Ban controversy.
A marker to the students who
worked to get the Speaker Ban
repealed is planned for McCorkle
Place. Details, page 6.
“I like the old style,” he says. “It’s
proven.”
NEIL CAUDLE retired in 2010 as UNC’s
associate vice chancellor for research and as
editor of Endeavors, UNC’s magazine for
research and creative activity.
