Artisan Showcase
Monterey Masonry: Working Stone the Old-Fashioned Way

The road to Sheffield, Massachusetts is surprisingly rural despite the commercial development on Route 7. Visitors can still see plenty of cornfields bordered by old fieldstone walls. There are farms, and quaint little towns that bring to mind the New England of the nineteenth century. Everywhere people can find reminders that life wasn’t really so different 200 years ago.
My mission was to find Mark Mendel at Monterey Masonry, an artisan who still does things the old fashioned way. He and his staff work with stone as a way of life. They know how to rebuild a dry stonewall, to refashion a missing fireplace surround, or to find suitable granite steps for any restoration site.
Monterey Masonry is the first driveway on Silver Street and sits less than 150 feet from the highway. The large granite sign out front is imbedded with nineteenth-century iron stars and bids a colonial welcome. The stone yard at the doorway attracted my attention immediately. Pallets of fieldstone, granite blocks, pieces of marble, and the like were everywhere.
Mark Mendel, casually dressed, came toward me as I drove into the yard. He shook my hand and offered to show me around.
“Everything is in one place now – stone yard, office, and shop,” he explained. “It’s pretty nice to have a heated shop now after years of renting space that didn’t work as well. We can use large vehicles to move projects in and out and we can easily work inside during winter.”
Mark explained that stone has to thaw before he can work with it, so the shop allows him to bring in a pallet of stone at the end of one day so it will be ready for the next day’s work.

Old and Local Stone
An important part of Mendel’s business involves salvaging hand-cut stone from old buildings that are being demolished. Mark explains that there is a tremendous amount of hand-finished granite that can be salvaged before a building comes down.
“A lot of our work involves refinishing old stone, cutting it to fit a job, or finding new uses for old stone,” he told me, gesturing to a pile of nicely weathered granite. “These beautiful window lintels can easily be turned into granite steps.”
We moved to another part of the yard where we reviewed stacks of old brick.
“Brick from the mid-nineteenth century has tremendous variation in quality,” Mark said. “You need to find a building made of hard-fired brick and save it because this type of original brick is always superior to the reproduction. We’ve got to be careful because brick that was meant for interior walls isn’t very stable when exposed to the weather.”
We next looked at a massive set of steps from a 1790 house that still had its two boot scrapers on the top stone. He showed me two salvaged bloodstone steps and a landing from an old tavern near Simsbury. He has well covers, old mill stones, and a myriad of other stone products.
He asked me to look at the color of some old marble, which had a lovely yellowish cast to it.
“Take a look at this wonderful color; do you know what it is?” he asked.
Before I could answer he told me that it represented a combination of a couple of hundred years of bacon fat, soot, and nicotine. It’s hard to reproduce that sort of color in new stone. You need to find stone that was dressed and cut a century or two ago.
In most areas, stone that was quarried locally was used because of the cost of transport. So Mark explained that it is important to consider what type of stone might have been used in a given town when considering a restoration project.
“Here in the Berkshires there was a lot of marble used in architecture,” he said.
Sometimes Mark finds marble set-up stones, steps, and fireplace jambs and lintels (called cheek stones in the trade). In this area, marble was the local stone. In Simsbury, they used a type of red sandstone generally called bloodstone.

Mending Walls
“We get calls all the time to rebuild old stone walls,” Mark told me. “There are all types of walls,” he explained. “Sometimes farmers just moved stones to the edge of their property when working the fields. Others were more sophisticated and built real walls. Many stonewalls have been picked by thieves for generations. Some of the best walls are still intact in remote locations of the forest where people couldn’t get at them. Some of these are stunningly beautiful, but a lot of them are gone forever!”
He explains that people’s appreciation for old stonewalls has gone from zero to 10 in a few generations.
People can easily work on their own wall restorations. Mark offers a class twice per year at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens.
“Wear tough gloves and start by placing the biggest stones on the bottom. Look at the stones before you pick them up so you don’t have to handle them twice. The basic rule is one over two and two over one – that rule is never going to change,” he stressed. “If you don’t break your joints, your wall is going to fall down. If you come across a corner stone, save it for a corner; don’t bury it in the wall. Always save flatter stones to cap the top. Lay the stone so the grain of the stone runs horizontally and make the longest stones run horizontally as well.”

Reproductions and Repairs
Monterey Masonry does accurate reproductions. They can re-fabricate a fireplace using old tools and correct materials. They know about bake ovens, lintels, and cheek stones and they work to make everything appear right.
“The project is not going to look right if the granite is imported from India or someplace else,” he said.
He told me that sometimes they are called in to repair a damaged lintel or other piece of stone and that they have to make what is called in the trade a “Dutchman” or patch, a reference to the thrifty nature of the Dutch. He can use part of the original piece, and replace a missing section so that the finished product appears seamless.

Traditional Tools and Techniques
Mark works by traditional methods using chisels and hammers.
“The finishes for stone are traditional and stone cutters still make them,” he said. “You need to remember that a stone may be slippery when wet, so when you make a step, it needs a hammer finish that’s not only decorative, but practical.”
He can saw stone using a wire saw and sand as grit. He can trim any stone to fit. Using feather wedges he can split stone along natural lines (hopefully). He also explains that when stone is freshly quarried it’s easier to work. As it sets, it hardens, so a lot of it isn’t much good for carving.
A lot of people find old stone on their properties. For example almost every old house in New England had a bake oven and fireplaces. When iron stoves came into use and these became unfashionable, the former were often ripped out, but the stone wasn’t moved very far. Often the stone materials can be found right on the property. Mark advises that you should look around for them as well as old foundation stones for barns and outbuildings.

Before Stonemasonery
Mark was a waiter and an artist at first, but shortly after college, he started his stonemason’s career.
“I came to New England and saw these stone walls and they grounded me,” he said. “The stones brought me back to the earth.”
He figures that there are worse things in the world to be than a New England stonemason and he likes being outdoors with the fall leaves and the air as fresh as it gets.
“This a fascinating field and it really borders on archeology,” he finished. “I find it energizing.”
Mark Mendel, Monterey Masonry, P.O. Box 58, Sheffield, MA 01257, (413) 229-0475, www.montereymasonry.com

If you care about old stonewalls, check out The Stone Wall Initiative at www.stonewall.uconn.edu. This is an organization dedicated to the preservation of New England’s stone walls that are slowly disappearing from the landscape due to criminal theft, insensitive use of private land, and what amounts to legalized strip-mining. They consider that stonewalls are antiques just like other artifacts.