It's been about 250 years coming, but Aquia stone that was once highly sought to build the White House and colonial-era buildings has been used to repair the doorway around the Cape Henry lighthouse.
Preservation Virginia, which is responsible for the lighthouse’s upkeep, used some of about 4,000 tons of Aquia stone that came from a quarry on the Rappahannock River. It’s the same material the original lighthouse builders sourced centuries before.
“In the historic preservation world, one of our key rules is that when we do have to do replacement, we try to match the original material as closely as possible,” said Eric Litchford, director of architecture at Preservation Virginia.
“To actually be able to say that (this stone) was brought here with the intention to build the originally constructed lighthouse is wild. It never gets that good in the world of preservation.”
Aquia stone is hard to come by these days because quarries for the material have long shut down. Aside from the quarry on the Rappahannock River just east of Fredericksburg that is now covered by the Fredericksburg Country Club, there was one on Government Island in the Aquia Creek in Northern Virginia that was used for government buildings in Washington D.C. and gave the stone its name. The island is now a park.
As ship navigation improved during the first half of the 19th century, other stone sources became more readily available. While being molded more easily, the Aquia sandstone could be argued as less durable, leading to its less frequent use, too.
“I personally think it's a beautiful stone,” Litchford said.
Familiar with the stone from its use at other historic sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Gunston Hall and Kenmore - Litchford realized that “it was fairly obvious that [Aquia stone is] just lying everywhere around the dune.”
Preservation Virginia used a combination of acid digestion and petrographic analysis to determine the makeup of the previously used mortar to make sure the replacement mortar is compatible and “interacts appropriately with the historic stone,” Litchford said.
The work at the doorway is one of the first large-scale replication projects at the lighthouse with Aquia sandstone. It will pave the way for future repairs around the windows in the leadup to the country’s 250th anniversary ceremony next year.
Built on a sand dune, President George Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton agreed to dig the foundation of the Cape Henry lighthouse deeper into the ground in the late 1700s to ensure more structural support.
Even so, the foundation became exposed due to the dune eroding away over the centuries.
To combat those losses, Preservation Virginia in 2019 built the plaza that surrounds the lighthouse today. Because the plaza is modern, material sourcing requirements weren’t as strict.
But now, a crack present in the original red sandstone above the doorway has allowed moisture to get into the structure, trickle down and deteriorate the decorative Aquia stone.
Moreover, the lintel, a metal strip spanning the top of the door above the Aquia stone to disperse weight pressures down the side of the entryway, rusted and expanded, leading to the Aquia stone outlining the door to crack.
The group enlisted the help of Dominion Traditional Building Group to complete the repair work without power stone saws and instead use hammer and chisels, truer to the tools of the time when the lighthouse was first constructed.
“I always find that the more fulfilling part of the job is putting the material where it wants to be,” said Hunter Shackelford, project manager with Dominion Traditional Building Group, while acknowledging Aquia stone may be found in piles at locations, but “it's harder to preplace.”
The Aquia stone is referred to as a “freestone,” meaning it can be carved out in all directions and easily cut to craft uniform bricks. In the records for the lighthouse, it’s called a “Rappahannock freestone” or “Aquia freestone,” Litchford said.
Dominion Traditional Building Group has used the stone before at other locations like Mount Vernon. They’re putting new tooling marks, left over from shaping the stone, in the replacement stone to mimic the marks of the original stone.
But one tricky part about the lighthouse is those swirling winds causing the mortar to cure quickly, meaning it will be more brittle. So Zion Peart, a craftsman, sprays water around the stone so the mortar can cure over time to be stronger.
Whether the stone was thought to have never been seen again or just be set aside, Peart said,“a couple hundred years later, it’s kind of cool to complete that process.”
Before the second Cape Henry Lighthouse was built in 1881, there was the now unusable, but still tourable, Cape Henry Lighthouse that was built in 1792.
For most of the 18th century, the 13 original colonies attempted to build a lighthouse at Cape Henry because it was an entry point for merchant and trade ships coming and going from Virginia and Maryland.
But it wasn’t until the 1770s, when the states put a duty, or tariff, on incoming ships to finance the lighthouse’s construction.
For the project, Virginia and Maryland purchased and shipped about 6,000 tons of stone from the Aquia Quarry to Cape Henry in 1774, but “this big event gets in the way,” Litchford said. “The Revolutionary War breaks out, and any progress on building the lighthouse completely stops.”
It isn’t until several years later when the first Congress of the United States passed the Lighthouse Act of 1789, that construction restarted. The law brought lighthouses under control of the federal government and directed a structure of such to be built near the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay.
John McComb Jr., of New York, who would go on to build several lighthouses still standing today, got the contract for the work, but ran into an issue and had to stop construction. During that pause, swirling winds on the open and exposed beach caused homes and the stone for the lighthouse to be buried.
“We have all the (lighthouse) keeper's records that are constantly like, ‘The sand is up to the roofline of the kitchen, or it's covering over the oil vault,” Litchford said. “It's a problem.”
So instead of digging the stone out from 10-15 feet below the surface, McComb found it cheaper to ship and use red sandstone from New York, leading to the lighter Aquia sandstone foundation while the rest of the structure is sandstone red.
“I think it's kind of symbolic and cool that the first federal works projects by the new government is using materials that originated from across the whole Eastern seaboard,” Litchford said. “We went from individual colonies to one unified country after the Revolutionary War. We have the materials coming from them all over the country, not one colony anymore.”
Litchford said his team looks at historic structures like data sets, “a record of the ideas and values held by the brand new federal government, by the people who use the structure, by the mariners who benefited from the building.”
“It's a record of the ideas and values held by the brand new federal government, by the people who use the structure, by the mariners who benefited from the building,” Litchford said. “When we're thinking about preserving structures in that light, this is something that's giving us a window into history.”