Originally published on July 16, 2020.
A few weeks back we mentioned here that St Paul’s church was planned and built for our founders in 1819. The commission went to Alexander Parris and Solomon Willard with a request to construct a church in the style of a Greek Temple to contrast with the existing colonial and gothic structures of the city. The body of St Paul’s church was to be constructed of Quincy granite. The Ionic columns on the portico of what we now call “the porch” were quarried out of sandstone from the Aquia Creek area in Stafford County, Virginia.
Why the different stone and the out-of-state sourcing? While the rest of the building was constructed of local Quincy granite (a very hard, durable stone), perhaps Parris and Willard desired a softer stone more easily manipulated to form the elegant, imposing columns which now support the portico. Crucially, our founders also desired a less expensive stone in order to meet their budget. The search for a softer and less expensive stone began and Parris and Willard eventually selected the quarry in Virginia. That may seem like a long way to go for stone. There must certainly have been a quarry closer to Boston that could supply stone at an affordable price? Why not brownstone from Connecticut. A document from our archive reveals that the “Potomac stone” from the Aquia Creek quarry in Stafford County, Virginia was $12 a ton, and $8 less than stone from Connecticut. Read more about the quarry here and here.
That Aquia Creek quarry had been the source of construction stone for many buildings in the new city of Washington DC, including the Capitol and the White House. We have learned recently that the quarry labor which produced this stone was from enslaved persons. We have learned that the “affordability” of the material purchased in 1819 rests in part on the fact that the people who extracted it from the earth were not paid for their labor.
So our questions are many. How do we reconcile our past? Who were our founders and from where did their wealth originate? What should be our relationship to materials we live with and whose origins are in systems of exploitation and extraction at odds with our faith? We have serious community discernment ahead of us, and as the Cathedral begins to investigate our past we also need to look to our future. Dean Amy recently wrote about what we as the Cathedral are doing to confront and dismantle racism and how we can commit our Cathedral to working towards being an anti-racist institution. Deeper knowledge of our building’s original materials reminds us of past exploitation and of the unfinished work of repentance and reparation.