Jan 14, 2007 - 10:31:32 CST
LINTON - Like cooks in a homestead kitchen, early builders made do.In Linton, they made more than do with local sandstone that caps off the high buttes around town. The stone was available and it was cheap, about 25 cents a wagonload.
About a dozen buildings in town dating back to the early 1900s are made from cut rectangles of that local stone. The historic buildings give Linton a unique and beautiful look, mainly because the stones are so uniformly cut and carefully mortared into place.
They have stood the test of time, like rock does.
As years, decades and now a century have passed, so have the details about the quarry men who cut the rock, the tools they used to cleave it, or even exactly which buttes around Linton were the quarry sites.
The stone wasn't in fashion for much more than a decade, and knowledge of it was short and swift.
Two weeks ago, an old bank building in Linton, with its sandstone vault, was torn to the ground.
Next to go is the three-story sandstone hospital, built in 1905. It stands off Main Street, in sentinel fashion to the several stone buildings that square off the corner of Broadway and Hickory a little ways down.
The hospital, after 1944 an apartment building, is scheduled for demolition this year. That's unless someone steps forward with $10,000 to buy it, the amount the Emmons County Commission would take to get the property square with back taxes, said county auditor Anna Mary Dockter.
Dockter said demolition is at a standstill for now, while the county waits for the State Health Department to move ahead on a contract to remove the asbestos first.
It has been empty for some time, windows busted out here and there, some stones crumbling off the top, and a bright orange snow fence wrapped around it to keep trouble away.
The fence looks like a gaudy necklace on a once-beautiful woman gone toothless and gray.
Dockter said there hasn't been any formal protest to demolishing the old stone building and it isn't listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
"It's kind of sad," Dockter said. "It belongs there."
It has belonged there for a century. It is painful for some to contemplate its destruction.
Susan Sandwick, of Linton, said it would take more money and work than the local historical society has to save it.
"We're not rich enough" to save every worthy building, and the society has had several offered to it, she said.
The historical society has saved and is using as a museum the old Episcopal church, which is another example of sandstone architecture in Linton.
She said the society could have had the old bank building, too, had it been willing and able to move it from its Broadway corner lot. "Everybody's getting older," she said, matter of factly including herself.
With one building down and another to go, at least Linton is still getting good use from the several other sandstone buildings in the community.
Mercedes Goetz has her abstract office in one of them, a one-story stone building on the corner, dating back to 1903 and the horse and buggy era.
She said it's comfortable and easy to heat. The inside has been modeled and remodeled with new materials and a false lowered ceiling that hides some of the old original arch in the front window.
She has black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall, with grainy images of her building with its tin ceiling and people from days past in it.
Law practices occupy opposite corners, though those buildings have sandstone foundations supporting concrete block structures.
Kristy Llerenas has the sandstone building next to Goetz's, originally a bakery built in 1905.
Llerenas went backward to go forward when she opened A Touch of Honey a few weeks ago, a business that features quality wax and honey products, like candles and body creams from the family's apiary business.
She went backward in history and decided to reface the storefront with local sandstone. She found a builder and he found a supply of the cut stone from an old building at a farm site. Because he wasn't laying blocks, the builder instead cut thin stone faces and laid those up, with a result that is aesthetically pleasing and in keeping with the historical nature of that stretch of the street.
"I like old things," Llerenas said. She said modernizing reincarnations of the building left it looking very ugly out front, though still rock solid underneath.
"You could drive down Main Street and not even notice it," she said.
Now it has personality and presence and the stone didn't cost more than stucco would have.
There is no shortage of sandstone in North Dakota, a sedimentary rock that ranges from sturdy and naturally well-cemented by minerals like calcium and silica, to loose and crumbly.
State Geologist Ed Murphy said while butte outcrops of sandstone are fairly common across North Dakota, particularly in the southwestern region, the rock was not often used as a building material.
He said loose field stone left by retreating glaciers was easier to collect and thus more commonly used for building.
Where it was quarried, sandstone was probably first fractured with small dynamite charges, evidenced by fist-sized holes in some of the pieces.
Then, quarry men and workers used mallets and chisels to refine the sandstone chunks into building blocks.
Murphy said the intense labor required to cut the stone and mortar it into place were limiting factors, as was the availability of stone masons.
In Linton, it's evident the best stones were used on the visible fronts of the buildings and more irregular pieces were used to build the rear walls.
Though it is used for decorative applications, like fireplace fronts, or pillar facing, no one builds with sandstone anymore. That's all the more reason to lament the loss of the grand old sandstone building in Linton.
"It's part of our history and it can't be replaced," said Sandwick.
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(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or Lauren@;westriv.com.)
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