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A version of the following essay, along with the photograph below,
was published 10/24/14 in the Concord Monitor
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| Stone Culvert, Boscawen NH: 10/16/14 CC Jean Stimmell |
Last Thursday we enjoyed a fall walk along the Merrimack
River in Boscawen on a newly opened section of the Northern Rail Trail,
following what was originally a Boston and Maine rail line.
At one point I stopped to ponder how the workers who built this
rail bed 150 years ago, without modern equipment, had been able to move the
prodigious amounts of earth necessary to build a raised causeway over the
expansive swamp we were crossing. Standing on this raised roadbed, we watched a
sizable stream snake toward us through the swamp and disappear under our feet
only to reappear on the other side.
Being an old stonemason, I was curious about what kind of
culvert the workman had constructed to let the stream pass through, a passageway
that was obviously still working perfectly, even after all these years.
It wasn’t easy. We had to make a long detour to find a
not-too-steep route down off the causeway and then backtrack to the brook. The
photograph above is what we found: a beautifully arched culvert, 12’ high,
built out of locally quarried granite, dry-laid without the use of any mortar
or cement.
The craftsmanship is superb from the precise way the arch is
constructed to the structural alignment of the granite pieces. But more than
that, it is pleasing to the eye in both shape and composition. To my biased
eye, this arch surpasses craft and is capable of standing alone as a piece of
art.
Yet, as hard as it is to believe in today’s world where
everybody is straining to achieve their 15 minutes of fame, this marvelous arch
was not concocted for the applause of others or to wow a crowd at a gallery
opening; it was simply built as a utilitarian structure in the backwaters of
Boscawen in a forgotten swamp that no one would ever see but trappers and river
rats.
Oh, how I wish I could have lived back in those olden days where
workers had the luxury of building beautiful things like this arch, just
because they could, before we all became ruled by the clock: when we had time
to finish things without hurrying, when we could stand back at the end of the
day and admire our work, not because it was cost efficient but because it met
our own standards of what is good and right.
XXX
