The Stone Archive
By Caroline Loewen
Edited by Ruth Jones
In 1886, Calgary’s Great Fire devastated the city’s fledgling town centre, destroying eighteen wooden buildings and damaging many more. In its aftermath, the most commonly chosen building material became a pale-yellow, fine-grained sandstone. City Hall, dozens of schools, churches of every denomination, public libraries, and private mansions were all constructed of the plentiful local resource, which was quarried from outcrops of the 60-million-year-old Paskapoo Formation that underlies much of southwestern Alberta. Calgary soon became affectionately known as “The Sandstone City.”
Calgary Fire Insurance Map, October 1911. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada
We tend to separate stone as a geologic entity and stone as a building material. But the stories that can be read in stone run throughout its history, from its geologic history in landforms and natural structures and its architectural history as part of the built environment. The stone acts as an archive of Earth's ancient geologic history, Indigenous stories, settler economies and immigration, and the city's more recent urban history. For someone who knows how to access and read the stone archive, the stone serves as a device for both storing and accessing these histories.
Future site of Hudson’s Bay Company Store, Calgary, Alberta, 1904. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives NA-1042-1
Geologists and archaeologists have long known that stone can be read as an archive of both human and non-human activity. In the seventeenth century, the Danish scientist Nicholas Steno first discovered the law of superposition. Sedimentary rock like sandstone accumulates in layers or strata: in an undeformed stratigraphic sequence, the oldest strata will be at the bottom and the most recent strata will be on top. The layers of stone create a chronology for the history of the place: much like a memoir or diary progresses through time, page by page, each layer reveals insights about a particular moment in time and space.
Paskapoo sandstone started its life as sediments of the ancestral Rocky Mountains that were eroded and carried downstream by rivers and deposited in their present-day location on the foothills and plains of southwestern Alberta: the formation takes its name from the Cree for the Blindman River, its banks lined with sandstone outcroppings. First propelled by slow tectonic forces upward, then pulled by water and gravity downward, the sand settled into sheets nearly a kilometre thick in some places. Features associated with this type of fluvial environment—deltas, flood or mud plains, point bars, and braided streams—can still be read in the stones where, to a keen and knowledgeable eye, cross-bedding, or sedimentation where the layers tilt and incline, indicates directional flow. Layered bedding planes indicate the passage of time as deposits of sand and silt build on one another. Laminations, or very fine-grained layers, indicate either a coastal environment or very quiet water that allows the grains to be sieved, sorted, and layered by size. Ripple marks in the stone indicate and record the movement of the water. The life and movement of these ancient rivers have been built into the stone’s very structure and etched onto its surface.
The sandstone also holds stories of a planet just recovering from its last mass extinction event when an astounding 75 percent of all the plant and animal species disappeared. Fossil records in the Paskapoo Formation show the remarkable diversity that emerged as ecosystems recovered and life evolved. Plant fossils that have been collected from the Paskapoo indicate that the area was formerly a semi-tropical swamp, a much warmer and wetter climate than present-day. The stone divulges wonderous and unfamiliar forms of life previously unseen in this area including evidence of prehistoric crocodiles and early primates. The stone is a burial ground—over time the once living has become lithic.
Discoveries continue to abound. In 2013, an avid fossil collector uncovered five fully intact fish fossils while excavating a basement for a new home in the Calgary neighbourhood of Evanston. Paleontologists were delighted at this rare find, which shed light on the fragile marine ecosystem of the early Cenozoic Era as life was beginning to recover from the extinction. The location of these fossils and the sandstone directly beneath our feet puts 60-million-year-old history next to contemporary buildings in a way that seems to erase the time in between. It’s a reminder that our human history, and Calgary’s history in particular, is much shorter than the history of this land. The land has been through numerous cycles of extinction, renewal, and growth, and continues on. In a city like Calgary, where much of the rhetoric around land, economy, and ideas of progress has been conservative and deterministic, it is important to be reminded that things were not always as they are now.
Jennifer Ireland, 6 . 26 . 25 . 2 . W. 5th, 2018
In Jennifer Ireland’s work, the histories written into textures and structure of the stone are recorded—its physical surface transferred to the paper through the simple act of creating a rubbing. Recognizing the potential for latent stories to emerge from the stone, Ireland attempts to transfer the stone archive into a paper one. And in the act of creation, she adds her own narrative of discovery, inserting herself into the archive and the story of the stone.
But reading an archive is never straightforward and relies heavily on context and the interpretation of the reader. The man who discovered the fossils in Evanston was a Young Earth Creationist and in his eyes the fossils were further evidence, however incongruous, of a Great Flood. “I love earth history,” he told the reporter from the Calgary Herald who covered the story. “And, of course, there’s two views that point as far as where the fossils come from, and one is the evolutionary one and the other one is the creationist one, and I believe the fossils demonstrate the creation catastrophe model much better than the evolutionary model.” (1) The human brain has limited capacity for conceptualizing the geologic timescale, and an abundance of myths and legends speak to this.
Stones are often deeply tied to spiritual or mythical practices. In his essay, Geophilia, or The Love of Stone, Jeffrey J. Cohen expounds:
Geophilia entwines the modern and the ancient, the contemporary and the medieval, the primordial with expansive futurity. Its pull and grip can render Noah’s Flood difficult to tell from the Permian Extinction. Even if one event is apportioned from eternity and the other from infinity, one from theology and biblical narrative, the other from geology and astrophysics, both are modes of conceptualizing deep time that stress the demarcative power of catastrophe, lithic impress, a fossil record of monstrosity, the thriving of life in cataclysm’s wake, the burgeoning of story, a dense and propulsive archive. (2)
The creationist brings a history connected to western expansion and North American evangelical religious practice to his spiritual interpretation. Indigenous stories reach back from a much longer human history in the foothills to find the place where the sacred and the geologic meet, seeing evidence of spirit in the forms of the earth. In Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park), a site of sacred geography for the Niitsítapi, or Blackfoot people, glaciers have carved deep channels into sandstone creating hoodoos, or sandstone pillars, cliffs, and caves throughout the landscape. The Niitsítapi believe that the rock formations have spiritual powers and house spirit beings. In the stone, the physical and spiritual worlds meet, and the petroglyphs carved into the cliffs over the course of some six thousand years served to both depict the past and foretell the future. In Áísínai'pi, the archive is literally written, or pictured, in the stone.
Most of the marks that the stone carries with it into the city are more mundane, a history of labour rather than ritual. In Calgary’s Edworthy Park, an abandoned sandstone quarry within the confines of the city limits, you can still see the marks of the quarry worker’s tools on the sandstone bluffs. At the height of the sandstone boom, there were at least fifteen quarries operating in and around Calgary, and it was estimated that over half of all skilled tradesmen in the city were stonecutters. Many of these stonecutters came from Scotland, where skills of the trade had been passed down for generations. (3) Initially drawn to Calgary to work with stone, these Scottish men brought their families and settled in the city, staying long after the sandstone boom ended. Today, people of Scottish descent remain Calgary’s third largest ethnic origin group. (4) Their influence on the city and its culture remains in many ways, not least of which is the name that the city carries—Calgary’s namesake is a Scottish castle on the Isle of Mull.
Sandstone buildings raised by the Scottish stonemasons of the nineteenth century dot Calgary’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, most of them originally used as commercial and retail space. These former law offices, general stores, hardware stores, grocers, and clothing stores created a vernacular architecture for Calgary, helping to give credence to the young city’s growing status as an agricultural and transport hub. Of all the building types though, the most prevalent were schools. Nineteen were built between 1894 and 1914—the years of the sandstone boom and a time when Calgary’s population increased tenfold—and many still stand. Some continue to serve their original function, but several have been converted, into government buildings, arts centres, and offices. They survive through creative instances of adaptive reuse.
Macleod Quarrying and Contracting Company, northwest of Monarch, Alberta, 1912. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives NA-3267-53
But solid blocks of sandstone, something that survived 60 million years of mountain building, major changes in climate, the coming and going of rivers and oceans, and years of glaciation, become so fragile once removed from the ground, gradually wearing away and returning to an earlier form—grains of sand. Sandstone is a porous stone, susceptible to damage from moisture and the continual freeze-thaw cycle that Calgary endures for much of the year. It is friable and prone to deterioration, cracking, and crumbling. Its lifespan as a building stone is only about a century, which means that many sandstone buildings in Calgary have suffered substantial erosion and are in need of attention and repair.
Several architectural projects in Calgary have attempted to blend the old with the new, and to preserve or restore aspects of historic buildings and integrate them into the new designs. For example, when the National Music Centre was built, it included a painstaking restoration of the 1905 King Edward Hotel, with its brick walls and sandstone window sashes, which now operates as a bar and music venue for the centre. The restoration and expansion of cSPACE King Edward saw the old sandstone school, originally built in 1912, converted into a thriving arts and performance venue.
More dramatically, in the fall of 2014, large chunks of sandstone fell from Old City Hall, reportedly landing at a city councillor’s feet, prompting a multi-year restoration of the 1911 building. The restoration crew had created an individualized plan for each block of sandstone on the building. The prognosis for each block of stone—and there are over 15,000 of them—varies based on its condition. Some are to be cleaned, others repaired, and some replaced entirely. On a private tour of the restoration in progress in February 2018, the project manager described the approach as similar to that of a doctor, seeing the building more as a patient than as architecture, perhaps subconsciously recognizing the life inherent in the stone.
Despite these efforts, the fact of sandstone’s vulnerability remains unchanged. Eventually, the stone will erode and return to the ground as sand, enacting a step in a cyclical pattern where it once again becomes part of the natural landscape. The landscape endures, while our structures are temporary. What indications of the stone’s short time spent as a building might remain evident upon its return to the land? How will Calgary’s history be written into the stone that forms from this most recent period of sedimentation?
Still from The Sandstone + The Sound of Stones, video, 2018, by Kelly Jaclynn Andres
In her video work The Sandstone + The Sound of Stone, artist Kelly Andres imagines what hidden forms, stories, or futures might be found in the structure of the stone. The video includes images of the surface and texture of the sandstone, sometimes bare but often covered with lichen and plant matter. A hand often enters the shot, caressing the stone as if attempting to coax its stories out of it. Andres asks us to listen to the stones themselves for the answers to our questions. “You may query lichen, but which of billions in this place? Lyrical, orbicular whirl, imagine how silly, how subjective their answers will sound, will intrude upon your intellect: what is the sound of stone and four million years old lichen?” (5) The question is only important to us. The stone, as with most of nature, remains indifferent to our plight, to our story, to our joys and our sufferings even as it is subjected to them. Were we to listen, we might hear stories of a world without us at the centre, where the lithic, and the floral, and the faunal, and the human, all share in the bounty of the Earth.
Endnotes
(1) Erin Sylvester, “60-million-year-old fish fossils found in Calgary,” Calgary Herald, May 28, 2015
(2) Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Geophilia, or The Love of Stone,” continent 4, no. 2 (2015): 8–18.
(3) Calgary Heritage Authority, Historic Downtown Calgary, last revised June 2017, https://www.calgaryheritageauthority.com/pdf/cha-walking-tour-brochure.pdf.
(4) Statistics Canada, Calgary Census Metropolitan Area, 2016, retrieved from https://www.calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com/research-and-reports/demographics-lp/ethnic-origin/
(5) Kelly Jaclynn Andres, The Sandstone + The Sound of Stones, video, 2018.
Bio
Caroline Loewen is a Calgary-based curator, currently working at the Lougheed House, a historic house museum. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of St. Andrews, and a bachelor’s degree in archaeology and art history from the University of Calgary. Her curatorial practice focuses on exploring ideas around cultural geography, place-making, memory, and cultural/natural landscapes.
