BLACKSBURG (AP) -- Despite an added cost of up to $1 million for each new building clad in it, Virginia Tech remains solid in its commitment to Hokie Stone.
More solid than Duke's volcanic rock and more colorful than the monochromatic rock used at James Madison University, patterned limestone mined in Montgomery County was decreed last year by Tech's board of visitors as the signature architectural feature of the university.
All new academic and life sciences buildings are expected to be clad in facades of the local limestone, while other buildings are expected to feature it in their designs, according to a unanimously approved resolution.
Officials hope recent mechanization of the quarry will reduce the price of building with the stone. About a year ago, the Highland Park quarry near Blacksburg's Woodbine subdivision was outfitted with high-tech equipment to reduce the work, and the cash, needed to produce the trademark stone.
On most mornings, a computer-driven saw with a 9-foot diameter blade cuts 5-foot-thick, boulder-sized stones into manageable pieces. Workers, frosted in rock dust, guide the sawn pieces through the chisel-lined mouth of a hydraulic splitter. The seams give way as the teeth slam down again, and again.
If the men are lucky, most of the seams yield rectangular stones of similar sizes, said Mark Helms, director of Tech's facilities operations.
Luck holds only so often, though, and the waste stone is dumped in another part of the quarry.
Helms said he's not allowed to sell the stone for use in anything but campus buildings. However, some of it is used for knickknacks shaped by hand at the quarry and sold at the university's bookstores.
Before the mechanization, part of the expense came from variation in the sizes of the stone, which had to be cut more than once to fit, Helms said.
Now the blocks are produced in a standard size and transported to the building site, where they are faced and attached as a facade. New processes are being used to attach those facades, too, after several buildings constructed in the 1990s developed problems.
Calcium has begun to leach out of the mortar joints on Lane Stadium, Torgersen Hall and others. It stems from attempts to speed up construction during a building boom in the 1990s, Helms said.
But today a cleaning process has been developed to remedy the streaking, and newer buildings are sealed to prevent the leaching, Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski said.
Another problem recently discovered is now being repaired at McComas Hall. There an unstable backing caused the stone facade to peel away from the building. Tearing off and reaffixing the stone using a more stable process is expected to cost $8.5 million, Owczarski said.
The story of the stone blocks fitted into the facade of the new academic and student affairs building now under construction at Tech began before European colonization. Before even the dinosaurs.
In fact, said geologist Bill Henika, all the limestone structures on Tech's 2,600-acre campus trace their flinty DNA back 450 million years, when present-day Blacksburg was a paleozoic tidal flat covered by a shallow sea. The rock formed over eons as calcium and magnesium particles were trapped in mud, and later squeezed upward by tectonic forces.
At the top of a steep valley, quarry workers who today walk on the bench-cut sides of that site tread on that ancient sea floor. There they blast and saw the fossilized calcium deposits into about 2,600 tons a year of building materials.
Layered as they are with iron, clay and magnesium, when laid on buildings the minerals weather to the familiar gray, black, tan and pink colors known as Hokie Stone.
In 1899, masons hired by Tech first cut 'our native stone,' as it was called then, from quarries adjacent to the campus. From it builders constructed what is now known as the Performing Arts Building.
After the turn of the century, administrators hoped to raise the profile of the fledgling college using limestone and collegiate Gothic architecture found at great European universities.
In this way, Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College would raise structures 'worthy to shelter a great educational institution,' President Joseph Eggleston said in 1914.
Today all but about a dozen Tech buildings feature some Hokie Stone, with most clad completely in it. But even a century ago, university officials were not the first to use the ancient stone.
Before colonists arrived, Woodland Indians are thought to have chipped tools from the dense dolomitic rock found locally, Henika said.
They were followed by 18th-century German masons-turned-settlers, funneled from the Shenandoah Valley into what is now the New River Valley. Those early colonists cut durable limestone foundations for barns and houses, some of which still stand.
For about two years in the 1980s, Helms worked on the rock at the Highland Park quarry, and said he vividly remembers the labor. The tools of the trade had not changed in generations.
About a dozen workers staff the quarry operation today, down from about 30 in the 1990s, when the stone was produced by a process 'out of `the Flintstones,'' Helms said.
Helms and co-workers drilled holes in the rock to set black powder, blasting boulders from the thick limestone seams. Hammers, chisels and handsaws were used to cut it down further. They were the same kinds of tools used by men like the late W.C. Saville, who went to work in Tech's first quarry at Prices Fork Road and West Campus Drive in the 1960s.
Saville was part of an exodus of masons who came off Brush Mountain, where they cut and carved millstones before international demand for that product collapsed at the end of the 1950s. When Saville started on the mountain, sledgehammers and draft animals were high-tech.
'I don't think people these days ... would much go for the hard labor or the environment you had to work in,' son Roy Saville said.
Once at Tech, the millstone cutters worked in the university's first quarry, dug where present-day Derring Hall sits. Together, they developed the traditional pattern of gray and black limestone and used it in campus landmarks such as the Newman Library and university bookstore.
The Derring quarry was covered over in 1953. In 1975, the Tech Foundation acquired the Highland Park quarry from the Cupp family of Blacksburg. Up to 90 percent of Hokie Stone produced today comes from that quarry. About 10 percent is black limestone purchased from a quarry in Lusters Gate, Helms said.
Even with the new equipment, the process remains labor intensive, and workers can produce only about 50 tons a week. Compared to commercial quarries elsewhere in Montgomery County, Helms said, the Tech operation is 'just a little scratch in the woods.'
Despite its small size, the operation has big work ahead of it as a campus building boom is well under way. The $89 million Center for the Arts under construction near downtown Blacksburg is expected to require 2,800 tons of the stone. Several other projects are in progress or in the planning stages.
To keep up, Helms said he's programmed the quarry saw to run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week.
Information from: The Roanoke Times, http://www.roanoke.com
(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
