Cottonwood Connection

Legacy in Stone

Season 5 Episode 4 | 24m 51sVideo has Closed Captions

Let’s look at how limestone has been a center point of construction and culture in Kansas.

10/13/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Legacy in Stone

Season 5 Episode 4 | 24m 51sVideo has Closed Captions

Let’s look at how limestone has been a center point of construction and culture in Kansas.

Kansas limestone has been key to both construction and culture in Kansas from its beginnings. In 1908, JT Lardner started a cut stone company that has carried on traditional techniques and contributed to the architectural landscape of the state for well over a century.

10/13/2024

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

Legacy in Stone

Season 5 Episode 4 | 24m 51sVideo has Closed Captions

10/13/2024

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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[Music] With various limestone deposits across the state, stone construction has been an integral part of life in Kansas since its beginning. And one cut stone company in the state's capital has been building and restoring stone structures with traditional methods a century old. (gentle music) Stonework has been around throughout the world for a long time. Limestone is mostly throughout the state in some form or another. In the eastern part of the state, it's the lower part of the elevation. So more limestone deposits are exposed and those limestone deposits are millions of years old. Whereas you get to the western part of the state, the limestone deposits are still millions of years old, but not as old. You get into the Cottonwood Limestone and into the east and some of those layers that the capitol is used in and a lot of them in the Flint Hills versus the Smoky Hill Chalk, which is a limestone in western Kansas. That limestone in the eastern part of Kansas is more solid. It has thicker layers and is harder to quarry than the Smoky Hill Limestone in western Kansas. And it's interesting to see the different styles and the different communities of the stoneworks that was done, whether they're stone walls around pastures or stone fence posts in the central part in the post-rock country in central Kansas. I'm Jon Pancost. I run a company that I began, it must've been 15 years ago called Bluestem Quarry and Stoneworks in Lucas, Kansas, Russell County. That's out in the post-rock country. Kansas is full of limestone. It's one of the economic drivers of this state in the early part of its foundation. I have the distinct pleasure of standing here in front of J.T.

Lardner Cutstone, which is the oldest cutstone company left in Kansas. They've been here for 120 some years. It's employed a lot of innovations and methods that are part of a bygone era of stone cutting. It's been involved in a lot of different projects throughout the area. When I finally discovered this place, I was just buying material. They had a product that I could not produce. They have a quarry of cottonwood. I found that throughout my career, I needed to diversify. I run a little post-rock quarry and it's the last post-rock quarry. Every time I pick up a piece of post-rock and I have an extra piece of cottonwood or silverdale, I think, well, there's a reason. Nobody has a post-rock quarry anymore because it is one of the most cantankerous pieces of stone you'd want to work with, but it works. So anyway, I learned about cottonwood and I learned about Lardners, and I came over here and started purchasing material for other projects. And Harold was kind enough to take me under his wing. My name is Harold Cromwell. I'm a journeyman stone cutter with J.T.

Lardner Cutstone. An old company founded in 1903. I became an apprentice back in about 1967. Served an apprenticeship through the state here. All together, I guess I've been here well over 55 years. And I love the business. Never worked a day in my life in the stone business. Lardner started me out and taught me everything I know. James Thomas Lardner started it. And his two boys run it, Jim Lardner and Corky Lardner. Cork and Jim were my mentors. They were hard men to work for because they worked a hard life and they expected you to do nothing but your best. And I learned a lot of things from them. It was quite an experience for a young man. I'm George Newton and I'm a grandson of the originator, J.T.

Lardner and my uncles behind me were my mentors. And to the best of my knowledge, my grandfather had come back here as a stone mason, stone cutter, and he had worked a few jobs. And then apparently in 1903, then he started this business, which wasn't exactly on this site right here, but was within a couple blocks of here. That's a company that had quite a history growing up. It shut down for the war effort, World War II. After the war was over, they went back to work cutting stone, but nobody thought about building insurance. Place caught fire and burnt to the ground. And trying to piecemeal it all back together. Rebuild machines is all they could do. And as they were doing that, the flood of 51 hit. That was 14 feet of water through this shop. And finally it all come together and they've been cutting stone ever since. Over the years between he and my uncle, it's progressed to what it is now. And we own about a two block area. And have different buildings and equipment and our own quarry. We are what you call custom stone cutters. We just copy whatever you draw up we make. Been quite a time down here. Had a lot of people, a lot of stone cutters. And the old men served it well. The methods that they do still employ here, they are a result of the industrial age. There were revolutions that took place. Not everything has done by hand anymore. But every aspect of it at this shop is still a product of human interaction with stone. They still use very old equipment. Some of it, almost all of it, they've fabricated parts for or completely fabricated themselves by hand. And you will see work that is hand chiseled. There was a gentleman in there just cutting some caps for a project. And he has to pick up a hammer and a chisel and interact with that piece of stone to complete the task. And to complete it to a level of quality that they have strived for here. These stones start off like this and then they have to have a return cut that returns this mold back here like this. Which, like this one. So that's done with a number of tools. The first tool does a heavy cutting. The second tool spans the reach of the work you're doing to get it close. And the third tool puts a finish on it. And these are all done with what's called an air hammer. Which is a pneumatic that you hold in your hand and control the vibration. From that, basically all you have to do is just rub a little. (rattling) And bring your lines to where they hit and voila. If you have any mares, you can take a finer piece of paper and touch them up. Then we always try and rub the finished edges to round them and relieve them just a little. Because they don't chip nearly as bad as the sharp edge. If you bump a sharp edge, it easily chipped. Once they've been dumped a little with the rub block, they, it gives it doubles their strength. Basically what you're doing is going from this to this roughed out to this finished. And you can see once you get the cuts to finish, that it's fairly nice and smooth. And done for that half. And I only have about 10 more to do. Some guys will tell you that the equipment's a lot like woodworking. Our planers, instead of the planer blade moving, the stone on the table moves. You scrape it, shape it. You can turn columns out on the lathe. Stone works quite well on that. Oh yeah, most of those machines out there are 40s vintage or some of them may be even older. And they're still the basic simple machine, but they're built heavy. And if they're well maintained, you know, you can keep them up and they'll run forever. And the tools are simple. Well, we have a double planer, which has got a wide bed. We built a turntable for it. With the turntable we built for it, we could turn a slab of stone eight foot in diameter. We have about two foot height. That's what we used to make these round windows in our office. They're one solid piece, 15 inches thick. And I think it was five foot, four inches diameter with a mold carved into it. Broadmoor Hotel, they have a three tiered fountain out there that we carved the bowls. We supplied the stone for the carvings to a sculptor that got the job. And he bought his bowls from us. The one was seven foot eight diameter fluted inside and out. Okay, this is our pattern table. And so basically it's full of different patterns and molds of stone that we produce for different job. And we keep these for reference in case something happens and we, for some reason we have to replicate it. This particular one will be a column cap. And so on some of these jobs, if lightning strikes, construction does damage, a tree fall, we have all these patterns from different, we're not at jobs that if we need to replicate, we have a hard copy right here. So it makes it so much easier to reproduce and we can set the tool basically right to this pattern and replicate it to the exact spot. So they're enormous amount.

This is actually a pattern here. So we keep a lot of those and then all these tools back here, a lot of more specialty tools that are set up to do if we have high volumes of intricate work. We make our own tools for the planers. We can, any design you make, we can make a tool to turn it or plane it. And we've got a wide variety tools, Ogee molds, corner-type mold, is no limit. We've learned how to bend carbide to make tools, so we can put this mold on a stone all at one time. And this is made specifically for a certain job, a certain pattern. And we've done a number of those over the years. And then some of our other specialty tools, we actually learned from the guy in Indiana, how to bend carbide, which is kind of an art, very hard, not easily done. But if you can bend carbide, then your tools aren't segmented, it doesn't leave marks in the stone, and we can actually produce tools that are all one piece and so a nice smooth finish. Can you do that in your own machine shop? I've set up a turning balusters. What they have is, you can see those, a ruff template and a finish template. And then it runs across at its own speed on a style of with a diamond compact cutter at high speed, and it actually cuts the balusters out at a pretty good rate. Our lathes, we got some old machines, but they still work quite well. We can turn columns on a taper, or a tapered with a ribbon, spiral cut, or enthesis. Enthesis is when the columns go up and come in on a radius, taper at the top. How large a dimension of material? We can get nine foot long columns, can do up to three foot diameter, which we did some three foot columns once. Really tough, it's a tough fit to get three foot in there to turn, but you'd have to saw your block about three foot one by three foot one, put it on a planer and plane the corners off. So it's an octagon shape, and then you turn it. I think those were right in around three to four ton. The quarry we're in, we moved to it in the fifties. We have a cottonwood limestone, which we feel is the best, the Cadillac of the state. We take a lot of time to cut the stone that we quarry out. We takes a lot of time to do what we do. There's a lot of natural faults, with the faults in the right place, we can peel it out of the ledge and handle it, we'll do that. It was too heavy to handle. We drill a series of holes and split it with plugging feathers, just wedges. It's interesting, I enjoy it, I like to swing that hammer. Or the average block that comes in would weigh around 12 to 15 tons. And they would be sawed in the slabs with a melt saw, and then brought to the main fam shop. They would put on circular diamond and rip it in the strips. Those strips didn't go to a planer, it could shape it and make a mold on it. Then you join off the length and you got your finished piece. The limestone's so prevalent that a lot of communities would open up a quarry and they'd use it to build like the old school houses or houses in that area. And so a lot of it was locally done. And I think if I'm correct, a cottonwood ledge, which is one of the better ledges, runs quite a ways in Kansas. And in particular, our quarry, which is one of the better ones, is a five foot high, five foot thick ledge with large dimensions. And so for that reason, it's a good quality building stone and it makes it cost effective when you can get blocks up big to get your square footage when you go to cut them. And so yeah, it's been prevalent. And I was at a symposium at Cottonwood Falls, which used to be somewhat of a hub for the limestone quarries and the production. And I was amazed at how many quarries they said they had opened back in the day. And they did sell blocks around the country besides usage in Kansas. And I mean, it amounted to a pretty impressive number back in the day when it was prevalent of how many they had. Some of the qualities of our stone, cottonwood, we have a bottom and a top ledge. The bottom ledge is more solid, compact. As you get up in the top ledge is porous. It's got many of the holes, those little dimples in it. Which way does it come out of the ground? See, right here, this way. So this would have been the top of the block. That's the top. Okay. That would be the bottom ledge. That top ledge tends the handle freeze and thaw four or five times greater than bottom. Bottom ledge will absorb the moisture, freeze and can deteriorate quicker. And there isn't anything much better than the carve in bottom ledge. Top ledge isn't that good for carving. Bottom ledge is solid. You can carve in that, but you can get detail. Oh yeah, over the years, there's quite a bit of little odd and end carving. Animals have been carved. Spanish conch for a hotel. All that kind of stuff. It's just a myriad of things that we've done. The bust of the lab dog in the office was carved by a German stone carver that came to this country after World War II and worked for years for my grandfather and my uncle and was a highly skilled stone carver. And the dog actually sat there and looked at him with probably a snack enticement. And he sat there and carved that out in, I don't even think it took him a day. And because he had the knack, depth perception, the skill. And it's really a fairly exact likeness, of its model. We have sent stone to California. Not a lot, but we've gone as far as Colorado many times. Other than that, we stick around Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri. Oh yeah, we actually have supplied stone all over the country, but most of it has been in the state. The themes of the colleges in Kansas were a lot of the buildings were limestone and they've tried to semi-stay with that theme. KU, K-State, Hays, Pittsburgh. There's a lot of stone buildings, limestone, cottonwood limestone buildings in Kansas. So we've done a lot of work on a lot of different colleges. This is those two columns at the Christian College in Manhattan. There's part of a church, there's the Mission Hills houses, there's churches, Supreme Court building is up here in the corner. The state Supreme Court building, judicial center, was one of our bigger cubic foot jobs. That had some other large pieces in it. Picture of the monolith that went back to the Arlington Cemetery for the Kansas, congressional, Medal of Honor winners. Everybody has their own section and they wanted Kansas limestone, kind of a cool picture of the first mobile crane in Topeka working the steps of the state capital in this kind of a unique piece of equipment that you look at nowadays, you go, really, they picked something up with that? Over the years, we ended up doing some renovation. In the last few years, we did the two different phases of renovation on Memorial Stadium at K-State. We did the addition on the student union, we did their new parking lot garage, we did their grain science g rowing facility, Bluemont Hall, Dierlin Hall, we did renovation on Nichols Music Hall. We've done the replace the column bases on the south wing of the Capitol building. You have to relieve all the outer face of the column base. We leave it and then you build, we made donuts that slid in on both sides and we placed those bases. There's quite a bit of handwork involved, but then you didn't mind it so much. Working on a job like the state Capitol building, we really kind of liked the work. (upbeat music) I'd venture to guess our legacy is pretty well set. After 125 years, however, it's a matter of the work we've done and it will stand for years and years. Well, one of the reasons you, even though you wouldn't know, you couldn't put a name to the work, but one of the reasons you would see J.T. Lardner's work in Kansas is because they've been established for so long and such a prolific shop, the amount of work that they've turned out of this little shop. It's kind of mind-boggling, really. I like taking a block of stone and making it slick and looking like something. I like to bring the life out of it. I fell in love with the business. I was probably 16 years old when I started working around it. Stone cutting to me is a passion for sure. Nobody does it because they think it's going to be, well Harold maybe, think it's going to be fun. And it is fun. There's a lot of aspects of it that are really fun. I suppose if you didn't care that much for the job, there'd be a lot of challenges. When you really like cutting that stone, the challenge is the rewards to do it. What are the rewards? To show that finished piece, no marks, and to hear people talk about it. Those are the rewards. Do a quality job. Maybe it's just a romantic view of mine. I just like the stone, the finish of it. It takes a lot more work. It's much harder than wood. And for the most part, if the stone's put in the right application, it'll last for several lifetimes. [music]