A remnant of our glacial past, fieldstones were generally
deemed a nuisance by farmers in Michigan. However,
in the nineteenth century, builders—both amateur and
professional—began making use of the state’s plentiful
supply of stones to build houses, schools, churches,
and countless other structures. Across every region of
Michigan, fieldstone buildings still stand, serving as a
reminder of our rich geological and agricultural history.
Above: Located north of Eastport, this fieldstone house was built by stonemason Jack Garrison around 1920. (All photos courtesy of the author, unless otherwise noted.)
In 1906, Father Henry J. Kaufmann decided something had to be done, and he had a rock-solid plan.
He was the pastor of St. Edward Parish in the small town of
Mendon in St. Joseph County, Michigan. According to the 1909 parish history booklet, the wooden church had a 1,200-pound bell in its “rather weak steeple.” In high winds, the steeple moved, stressing the whole structure, and plaster above the congregation sometimes cracked and fell: “In times of severe storms even the bravest would quake at the crackling of the timbers overhead.” A new church was needed.
Father Kaufmann proposed “a field-stone church,” larger than the old structure, with a “lofty steeple” and a spacious basement. The 40 families in the parish that were
financially able were asked to contribute a total of $10,000 over the next few years, plus “1,500 loads” of stones from their farms.
The parish agreed, and the new church was completed in the fall of 1908, with the top of the cross on the steeple standing 110 feet high. The masonwork is described as “rather unique” and in “the rustic rubble style,” with most of the rock faces “not touched in a single instance by the mason’s hammer.”
Fieldstones and Cobbles
The story of the St. Edward church was not an unusual situation in the stony state of Michigan. All over the Lower Peninsula and in parts of the Upper Peninsula, fieldstone houses were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—and a lot of them were do-it-yourself projects. It appears that low cost was a key factor.
In addition to hundreds of houses, still standing are fieldstone churches, schools, town halls, barns, chicken coops, tombstones, mausoleums, train stations, former gas stations, institutional and commercial buildings, and more.
Fieldstone home construction in Michigan dates to at least 1836, when the Orrin White House was constructed in Ann Arbor. Also located in Ann Arbor, the Ticknor-Campbell House was built in 1844 at what is now Cobblestone Farm. It was originally the home of Dr. Benajah Ticknor, a U.S. Navy surgeon. The stonemason—Stephen Mills is identified as the probable builder by the Cobblestone Farm Association—was a local man who had previously lived in upstate New York and was familiar with the coursed cobblestone homes there.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, some higher-end homes in Michigan were built using “dressed” fieldstone, which were trimmed to a block shape. Later, many other homes were made of fieldstones that received little to no trimming, including cobblestone structures.
Cobblestones can be fieldstones, but not all fieldstones are cobbles. Relatively small and of a softly rounded bean shape, cobbles that are similar in shape and size
St. Edward Parish in Mendon in St. Joseph County, Michigan. Beginning in 1906, parish members donated both time and materials to build the fieldstone church.
are sometimes found concentrated in large numbers. In Grand Rapids, short stretches of three old city streets—all running up and down steep hills—are paved with cobblestones and still used every day.
Fieldstones are generally found on the ground surface or in rivers and lakes, as opposed to stone blocks cut from quarries at much greater expense. Quarried sandstone was used to build many old mansions and other large institutional structures in Michigan cities.
“The Crop That
Never Fails”
How many fieldstone structures are there in Michigan? Hundreds, for sure—and certainly thousands if counting all the structures with fieldstone foundations, basements, and porches.
Many barns and farmhouses built before the 1930s have fieldstone foundations. One barn on M-32 in Antrim County was built in the 1920s by Samuel J. Bricker. Its walls are built entirely of fieldstone, right up to the roof. The farmhouse near it, behind a screen of thick evergreen trees, is also made of fieldstone.
Take a drive through Michigan today. The fieldstone porches and foundations can be seen everywhere—and in the state’s largest cities too, not just rural areas.
Why so much fieldstone construction? Because the stones were here—actually, still are here—scattered within the sand, gravel, and clay left behind by the melting, one-mile-thick Ice Age glaciers moving between northern Ontario and southern Ohio for more than 2 million years.
According to Michigan Geography and Geology, some of the thickest glacial drift that was dumped in North America is in Michigan—as much as 1,200 feet deep in some places near Cadillac. The average depth of glacial drift over all of Michigan is 300 feet, as stated by Stanard G. Bergquist in his article, “The Glacial History and Development of Michigan.”
While lumber barons were busy clearing out Michigan’s famous white pine forests, land promoters promised that the impending removal of the trees would
Leonidas Elementary School
in the village of Leonidas features artistic stonework
completed by Charles E. Blue and
Laverne Harman, c. 1935.
A cobblestone tombstone for a soldier killed in World War I, located at Hillcrest Cemetery in Six Lakes.
The Michigan Central Railroad Station in
Lawton is one of several fieldstone
railroad stations in Michigan and dates
back to the late nineteenth century.
Clarence E. “Fatsco” Brown was a hunter and fisherman from Benton Harbor who built fieldstone hunting cabins near Epoufette to thwart porcupines that had chewed his formerly wooden structures. The cabins are still used during deer-hunting season.
open up prime agricultural land. However, many aspiring farmers who settled in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula discovered that much of the area had sandy soil—great for white pines but not for agriculture in general. Later, some sandy soils close to Lake Michigan were found to be good for fruit growing.
Thus farm families struggling to make a living after 1900 no longer had cheap white pine lumber available. But most farms throughout Michigan did have an abundance of “the crop that never fails”—frost-heaved rocks that had to be laboriously removed from cultivated fields, sometimes every few years.
Another factor that probably made fieldstone construction more practical was the huge increase in Portland cement production in Michigan during and after the 1890s. That increase was mainly due to advancing technology that enabled the development of the immense limestone deposits near Lake Michigan at Charlevoix and Lake Huron at Alpena.
Many Michigan farmers learned the basics of stonemasonry, likely out of necessity. Around the turn of the twentieth century, labor was cheap, but building materials were not—except for fieldstone. Two acclaimed fieldstone builders who were well-known in Southern Michigan from the 1920s to the 1950s were Charles E. Blue and Laverne Harman. Both were listed as farmers in census records from those decades. The 1930 U.S. Census of Leonidas, St. Joseph County, also lists Blue as a 63-year-old stonemason.
Artistry in
Architecture
Some of the fieldstone houses standing today were originally older wooden houses that were “stoned” in the early twentieth century to provide greater strength and an updated look. For instance, the Ralph and Margaret Hinkley Centennial Farm south of Evart had a stone exterior that was a later addition to the farmhouse.
Another example is a little stone house in Allegan County, close to the intersection of 30th Street and 128th Avenue, still known to some locals as Knobloch Corners. It
was originally a wooden structure from a nearby farm and was purchased by the Knobloch family in approximately 1935. Brothers Herman, Julius, and Levi Knobloch used a team of horses to drag the building down the road to their farm and installed it near the intersection. It was then rebuilt with fieldstone walls to serve as a Mobil gas station and convenience store. Peter McNab, a local Scottish stonemason, laid the fieldstones.
Fieldstone construction seemed to encourage more creativity than conventional wooden or brick structures. Some of Michigan’s fieldstone houses, several of which are well over 100 years old, have the name of the builder or first owner carved into one of the stones—perhaps illustrating the pride of building sturdy structures that last for generations.
But there are also artistic design aspects that set fieldstone buildings apart from others. For example, alternating rows of cobblestones occasionally appear in a herringbone fashion, which vividly
Top: The Knobloch Corners Mobil gas station being “stoned” in 1935. (Photo courtesy of the Peter Knobloch family.) Inset: The former Knobloch Corners station in Allegan County, as it is seen today.
The Ralph and Margaret Hinkley house in northeast Mecosta County.
stand out from the larger fieldstones above and below.
It became fairly common after 1910 for stonemasons—be they amateur part-timers or full-time professionals—to decorate walls with mirror-image split stones or other intriguing rocks, fossils, and minerals. Such features are often found on front walls or around main entrances. The stone store at Knobloch Corners has a piece of fossil coral high up on the front wall, as well as a number of pudding stones.
A two-story fieldstone house completed in the late 1940s north of Eastport on the old Dixie Highway has striking rows of fieldstones high on both the north and south walls that appear to have been painted a shiny black. But it is not paint—the rocks are actually basalt, from the nearby shore of Grand Traverse Bay. The builders and owners, father and son Frederick and Lester Brooks, constructed the stone house up around their small shack while living in it. Working on the house only in the warmer seasons, it took them about ten years to complete, according to a descendant.
The Maples in Dowagiac is a three-story mansion built of boulders that was completed in 1896 by Archie Gardner, a wealthy heir of Philo Beckwith, who founded the famous Round Oak Stove Company in 1870. Next to the formal entry door of the Romanesque Revival structure, an opened, hollowed geode is set in the wall, where callers would leave their cards back in the days of high society. Next to the
geode, a large, prehistoric megalodon tooth is cemented among the stones.
In Traverse City, the Aberdeen Stone Cottage at 315 N. Elmwood Avenue—now a bed-and-breakfast—was built using baseball-size stones in the 1920s. Cemented with the stones high up on the front wall is a ceramic piggy bank, the same size and round shape as the stones.
A fieldstone house in Hartland has a bird feeder built into one of the walls—and there are many more examples existing today of twentieth-century stonemasons’ artistry.
More Fieldstone
Examples
Perhaps the most popular decorative touch of the state’s fieldstone structures is pudding stone, technically called jasper conglomerate—usually a white quartz matrix containing flecks and pebbles of bright red jasper, black chert, and other minerals. Although earlier stone houses do not tend to include pudding stones, the material shows up frequently in the walls of fieldstone houses and other buildings erected after World War I.
The pudding stones found in Michigan, from Drummond Island all the way down the Lower Peninsula into Indiana, are from an outcrop near Bruce Mines, Ontario. In 1933, Professor Chester B. Slawson of the University of Michigan published a research paper titled “The Jasper Conglomerate, an Index of Drift Dispersion.” Using the
A house in Traverse City built in the 1920s. Today, it is known as Aberdeen Stone Cottage and is a bed-and-breakfast.
A close-up of a pudding stone on the John Hinkley house, built near Evart in 1919.
Right: The Immaculate
Conception Catholic Church in Lapeer,
constructed between 1895 and 1905 using
local fieldstone. (Photo courtesy of
Paul R. Burley.) Far right: A fieldstone
structure that is part of the Northville
Historical Society’s Mill Race Village.(Photo courtesy of
pudding stones’ distribution, the paper demonstrates how the glacial ice cap moved from the northeast and picked up material in Canada and deposited it in the Lower Peninsula, Wisconsin, and beyond. That giant conveyor belt of “processed” earthen material—billions of tons that were ground up, rounded, and sifted under the ice—even included a few diamonds from northern Ontario.
To many people, fieldstone houses have an intriguing aura of being rugged and primitive, able to stand year after year despite wind, rain, and snow. A few families and individuals, who could afford to spend more on labor, built castle-like structures. One whimsical fieldstone house, located in South Haven, was built in 1904 for Charles and Mattie Hemenway. The architect was A.M. Worthington; the contractor, E.W. Case; and the mason for the fieldstone work,
Sears, Roebuck and Company executive Albert Loeb at the construction site of the Loeb mansion in Charlevoix, which was made using fieldstone in 1918. (Photo courtesy of the Charlevoix Historical Society.)
An impressive two-story fieldstone farmhouse with all the modern conveniences of 1918 was the hallmark of success for John Snyder, a hardworking potato farmer who lived a couple miles west of Greenville on what is today M-57. The structure earned the admiration of a newspaper reporter from the Greenville Independent, who featured the house in an article with photos on February 19, 1919.
“There is something entirely different in the home architecture, in the exterior design of this beautiful residence,” wrote the reporter. “While it is a field-stone house, it is far and aloof from a cobblestone.” Many of the stones came from the Snyders’ 170-acre farm, but “in order
The Snyder House: A Monument to a Tragic Era
According to one of their grand-children, John and Jane Snyder had 12 children. However, just one year after the publication of the flattering newspaper article, the Snyder family suddenly changed forever. In February 1920, four of the Snyder children died in one week from pneumonia that accompanied the worldwide influenza pandemic.
“The death angel paid two more visits to the home of Mr. and Mrs.
to carry out the original plan,” some stones came from east of Greenville, while others were from the village of Parnell, about 15 miles to the south.
The article states that “no evidence of the mason’s hammer appears” on the surface of the stones, though there was at least one expert stonemason. Roy Lavoy—incorrectly spelled “Laroy” in the newspaper—supervised the masonwork, assisted by his father and brother.
22 Michigan History • Mar/Apr 2020
Above left: Photographs from the February 19, 1919, issue of Greenville Independent, which praised the home of John and Jane Snyder. The home featured large fieldstone boulders surrounded by rings of cobblestones in a “string of pearls” finish. (Photo courtesy of the Flat River Community Library.) Above right: The Snyder house as it is seen today.
public—is the massive fieldstone summer home the Loebs built overlooking what was then called Pine Lake—Lake Charlevoix today. A few years after it was built, a special guest at the mansion was attorney Clarence Darrow, hired to argue against the death penalty for Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb in the sensational 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder trial in Chicago.
A similar fieldstone barn, plus other buildings, was built in the 1880s near Jackson for Theodore G. Bennett, a wealthy industrialist who wanted, and got, a highly publicized dairy herd. Today, the Bennett Farm buildings still stand and are occupied—as condos.
There is so much intriguing history in Michigan’s fieldstone structures, such as the Woolsey Memorial Airport in Northport, architect Earl Young and his famous stone houses in Charlevoix, Emory L. Ford’s rustic fieldstone mansion in the forests near Port Huron, and sportsman Fatsco Brown’s porcupine-proof hunting cabins in the Upper Peninsula. The list goes on and on. And a leisurely drive on a country road in Michigan might suddenly reveal yet another stone house that merits a second look. A
Pete Daly, a native of Hart, Michigan, has a journalism degree from Michigan State University. He began as a daily newspaper reporter and worked as a writer, editor, and photographer at various publications.
Willoughby W. Sweet. A postcard from 1910 identifies it as Rock Terrace Resort, but it was later an apartment house. Today, it is a private home.
Probably the best-known imitation castle in Michigan is Castle Farms near Charlevoix, now a tourist attraction and wedding venue. However, the word “castle” was never used in the first newspaper accounts describing its construction and planned use. It was designed as a massive dairy and livestock barn on a farm started in 1918 by Albert Loeb, an idealistic executive of Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago. Loeb wanted to demonstrate the potential of agriculture in Northern Michigan, and the farm would also serve as a working demonstration of agricultural equipment sold by Sears.
Not far from the farm buildings—but out of sight today and strictly off-limits to the
The Loeb Farms Barn Complex in Charlevoix County, Michigan, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The complex features several fieldstone structures and is currently an events facility called Castle Farms.(Photo courtesy of Castle Farms/The Weber Photographers.)
Above top: The Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house at the University of Michigan was a Queen Anne-style fieldstone building. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-D4-11934.) Above: A postcard of South Haven’s Rock Terrace Resort from 1910. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Association of South Haven.)
John Snyder, since our last issue,” began an article from February 25, 1920. Dead were children Freddie, Bertha, Grace, and Carl. Readers were told that “the burden of grief and sorrow that has fallen on this excellent family is very heavy indeed.”
One son, John Jr., caught pneumonia and might have died had not a doctor come to the Snyder house and performed an emergency operation on him on the dining room table. In order to successfully drain fluid from the little boy’s flooded lungs, the doctor had to break one of the child’s ribs.
The Snyder family plot is located in Oakfield Township Cemetery. There are four tombstones side-by-side—for Grace, Bertha, Carl, and Freddie. The Snyder house still stands and is a reminder of the misery of the pandemic that swept through the world from 1918 to 1920.
