Welcome to the Cottonwood Ranch, Something that's kind of unique about Cottonwood Ranch State Historic Site is all the stone buildings.

A lot of people come west on Highway 24 and see a lot of rock buildings even within a few miles of here.

Say, Hill City and Nicodemus and farther east.

And so why did they build out a rock?

Well, we'll explain why and how Here in the Cottonwood Ranch in the original one-Room house, it was a rock building with a dirt floor.

Why didn't they use lumber and maybe build a log cabin?

Well, the reason was there were no trees along the South Fork of the Solomon River, because fires kept them out.

So the only choice of construction materials you had were rock and sod.

This is part of the original part, built in 1885 with the stone.

The gray stone in the wall was quarried about 150 yards north of the house.

The yellow stone was quarried about a mile southwest of here.

Now, the difference in the rock is the Yellowstone is a lot older.

It's about at least 65 million years old.

And it was formed when Kansas was a big inland sea during the geologic Cretaceous area.

Now this is at the bottom of the sea.

It was kind of a slimy mud.

These are actually skeletons of plankton and stuff that have settled down in this.

And this is where we get the aquatic animals such as the mosasaurs, the great big clams and shark teeth in this formation.

Now, it's called the Niobrara formation, but this is the Smoky Hill member.

And to explain that easily is if you had a book that was named Niobrara and you went through the book and there were several chapters in it, you would find the Smoky Hill chapter.

So the formation is a big section of rock.

And the members of the rock are like the chapters in the book of what make it up.

So it's very old.

It was from the sea.

Very soft.

Now, the grey rock is the Ogallala.

And you say, well, that's kind of a strange word for a rock.

Why isn't it sandstone or limestone?

Well, it's the Ogallala because it's about half sand and half lime.

The lime cements the rock together, just like this is lime mortar, lime and lime and sand mortar But this is 65 million years old or more.

This is only about 5 million years old.

So there's a big gap in here where something happened, where a lot of erosion happened.

And knocked out all the stuff between 65 million years old and 5 million years old.

Now, this 5 million years old stuff came from the Rocky Mountains as the Rockies were being formed and pushed up.

This was the slope going to the east that came out.

So it trapped all the water.

The Ogallala is called the Ogallala Aquifer, meaning it contains water.

And this is where in western Kansas or the high plains from Texas into southwestern South Dakota is underlying and it has the water.

in it where we get the irrigation and most of the streams come out of.

The base of the Oglala is and most of the streams come out of the base of the Oglala is kind of a greenish rock with a lot of quartzite in it.

And that's a derivative of quartz, and it's much harder.

Examples are as near as three miles east of the Cottonwood Ranch at Antelope Lake, which is the WPA project in the 1930s where the shelter houses are made of that rock.

A really good example is 17 miles to the east at Hill city Their city park and their city hall is made out of the the green stone which is rock.

It's very attractive but very hard and that was more complicated to build that.

There's various types of rock in Kansas that were used for building materials and they're the same geologic age, but they're totally different.

The structure at Fort Larned is a red sandstone called the Dakota Sandstone, which was a beach.

And so what we have here is in the high plains of Kansas and western Kansas is the western third of the state, basically, we have the the yellow rock or the sedimentary rock from the sea floor.

And on the edge., Ellsworth County, Pawnee County, where Larned is, and some of the others where the rock is red.

That was the beach.

So that's sandstone rather than the limestone, but they're same.

So we're dealing with fossil sea and fossil shoreline This is a stone quarry site about a mile southwest of the Cottonwood Ranch.

This is where the Smoky Hill chalk was obtained, which was used on the north side of the original house built in 1885 and also the coins.

That's an English term for the cornerstones or colorful cornerstones that add a lot of architectural beauty to a building.

This was quarried by drilling holes in the rock and using what's called feathers and wedges.

And the feathers were two small strips of of steel and the wedge was looking like a chisel.

So you drill these holes ten to 12 inches apart and put these feathers and the wedge in and you would pound those down until you got a certain ping to them, and then the rock would crack off in a line.

This rock was quarried probably hauled on what were called stone boats.

And those are kind of sleds.

They wouldn't be put in a wagon because the wagon couldn't hold this much weight.

But a boat with no wheels on it, kind of a sled could do that.

Okay.

There's these kind of ridges or little stripes we'll call striations.

That means it's been cut.

This was cut with a saw.

This is soft enough that you can saw it with a carpenter saw if you need to.

But what we found at the Cottonwood Ranch is that they used a saw with the jagged wood cutting edges on them.

We're doing an experiment here to see if we can duplicate the cut marks on one of the stones by three different sorts of saws, a bow saw, modern bow saw for trimming trees with wood cutting teeth on it.

A single what would be called a crosscut saw with wood cutting teeth.

for cutting trees down.

But notice the similarity between the blades and the teeth on the blades of both saws.

This happens to be just bigger than the one on the steel frame.

Also, we're going to use as comparison to try to replicate the cut marks is a regular carpenter.

Quinn Lowry will be doing the muscle work and he will put on his safety glasses if you're worried about him hurting his eyes.

These rocks were probably taken from the quarry where the the rock from the Cottonwood Ranch came from.

Okay, look at that.

He'll hold that up.

Look at the saw marks in that.

We will compare it to the saw marks in this.

You can see the striations and saw marks.

Oh, already?

It's very similar to what's here.

So it was that used with a what they would call a buck saw, which would have had the same sort of cross-cut teeth or the wood teeth as each have.

We don't know.

But we'll cut another slab with another saw and have more for comparison.

Saw number two, that we'll use is a one man crosscut saw.

So it's a bigger saw.

And whether it's actually fast or not, we don't know because of course, the stroke is bigger This seems to be a little coarser.

Now we're ready for.

Saw number three, a handsaw they used for regular carpentry.

The stroke is shorter, so it takes more energy in a way on this.

It's it's lighter.

But see it's a shorter saw finer teeth.

And so it doesn't go through quite as quickly That's very fine.

Yeah.

And so by the time we get the dust off in comparison, it is a lot smoother.

Okay.

These are all from the same rock or the same slab.

I think the most accurate was probably the first one because we have a more coarse grain or the striations coming through here.

But it very much duplicates that of the use of the bow saw here.

Now, what they would have probably used, and that was what is commonly called a buck saw which has instead of an aluminum frame, they have a wooden frame and the buck saws were bigger, but the wooden frame came up and was anchored and that was what most people cut firewood with around the home.

So it was probably a buck saw with a wooden frame, but very similar to the blade that's on this as far as the the tooth spacing and the sharpening.

But the band itself may have been thicker, but that would have no effect on how the cut looked.

It's all in the teeth and the pressure and the softness or hardness of the rock Okay.

We're at the corner of the house which shows both the 1885 original part of the house and the next edition to the house in 1890 where my hand is now.

So this is a corner.

1885 here, 1890 here.

Now the difference in this, this type of the stone and the construction idea is different.

These stones are the Oglala all of them are, but have been sledge out.

See the various shapes and sizes of these big stones, smaller stones, little stones.

And they were just taking a sledge hammer they have rough edges on them all the way through.

Whereas these rocks are more of a regular square or rectangular shape and they have the dressing marks on them illustrated by where they took a tooth or serrated tool which may have been a wedge shaped hammer or a broad wide chisel that had serrated teeth that these jagged teeth.

And that's what makes these marks.

So they were shaping these and smoothing them down a lot more than they did the rough stone so we'll call this dressed stone because they were dressed with a hammer.

That means they were smoothed and altered, whereas these are natural stones just smudged out with the big hammer and put up.

The rock was called about a mile and a half northwest of here for these outbuildings.

And he let men quarry that stone and on deliver it to the ranch.

He paid them $4 to $5 per cord.

A cord is a measuring unit same as with firewood.

It's cubic feet.

Originally at the quarry were it came off ledges.

They would drill holes in the rock with big rods and a sledge hammer and one guy would hold the rod on the hole and turn it because at the bottom of the the rod and it's about a two inch rod was probably a star shape or a cross.

And so one guy turned it, another guy pounded.

Then you better trust the guy that had the sledge hammer to do that after the hole was in and several holes, they would stuff those holes with black powder.

And so you blow off big ledges and then after the ledge was blown off, you would take a sledgehammer and cut these down in the size of the blocks you wanted.

Okay.

We're going to try another experimental thing.

I have two chunks of Oglala rock.

It cannot be sawn.

The saws will not work on it because the sand and stuff, the teeth would dull immediately.

If you could even get through them.

Quinn will try just to knock any chip off anywhere.

So he has a hammer?

Probably these guys were using 3 pound mallets, a masonry chisel, which is beveled only on one side for cutting.

Then, of course, these are both modern and we will see how that works with the rock.

Okay.

He was able to chip one edge off, and that's a dry rock.

But you can see how it was shattered and it was a little bit irregular.

But he can try smoothing that off a little bit since it's on that rock and it should be fairly stable and this might be okay for a house, but it would be rough.

So with the dressing to get it right, you'd have either a toothed hammer or a toothed chisel to trim it off and make it look good.

The stone walls in a lot of the buildings throughout northwestern Kansas, the stone buildings are built the same, and it doesn't make any difference what ethnic group it was.

They all adapted.

And basically what that style is, what the architects call a wythe.

W, y, t, h, e. and that is a stone layer for a wall.

And so these buildings we'll say is a three wythe wall.

The way these rocks were built in all the buildings with this is you had a outside layer of rock, an inside layer of rock.

So you had two layers with a spacing between then for the Cottonwood Ranch that was filled with, say, scrap rock in between the two walls and also with a sandy probably a sandy and limey mix mortar.

A lot of that mortar has a very yellowish or tan cast to it.

Seems like it's a lot of the dust, of the sawdust to give it its color from the rock, and that had the lime in it.

And then so then they put in a little bit of river sand with it and some sort of moisture to do it.

But it's very friable.

That is it crumbles quite easily, but it's on the inside of the wall.

So it's fairly well protected Welcome to Silent John's place.

Silent John was the last resident of this building through probably the late 1960s, maybe even the early 1970s.

But this was originally built by James F Kirk, also known as Jimmy Kirk, who is Abraham Pratt's half brother.

So we have the wythes, we have the outside layer, that we're talked about they're generally about six inches thick.

We see dressing marks in this where they dressed it down so it would fit in and fit.

And then we have the friable fill.

Now this has is like a Cottonwood Ranch.

It looks, appears to be the same mixture that's fairly solid.

It's mixed with some sort of dust and stuff, but it's still very friable and would work in here for the settlement of the building.

So it's softer than the rock.

So if it settles, it does well.

And so outside layer the interior layer or the wythe, this is the back part of the wall for the inside.

Being curious about this and not used to historic construction, that wasn't my training.

And so I ask historic architects and architectural historians why there are three deals and I basically got three answers but not have more clear.

And some said, well, people, our ancestors were smaller than we are today.

But pound for pound, they were a lot tougher and a lot stronger.

But we'll use the example in the Cottonwood Ranch, if you had a block of Oglala that was, say, two feet long, a foot high and maybe two feet across on these walls, that thing would weigh about 200 pounds.

you'd get tired of lifting those rocks, and especially once you've got higher lifting them above your head, you couldn't do it.

So some say so that was for convenience.

You have smaller rocks so you can handle them.

You put them in and build up.

Others say, Okay, you did that.

And the middle part, you filled for insulation.

Others say, No, that's in there as a barrier.

So if an outside wall with the thicker rocks would happen to, the ground would settle and the wall would crack that rubble and mortar fill, sand fill and limestone stuff in the middle would be a barrier so that crack wouldn't carry through to the inside wall or vice versa from inside wall if it cracked to the outside wall, it could be any one of those ideas, or it could be the combination of all three.

We don't know.

When we got to researching these things, we were about 20 years too late of being able to talk to anybody who had actually built these houses or seen them built.

This is what many people would call a soldier joint because you get a seam that isn't, If we look at a brick wall, we would have a mortar line here, and then we would have another rock that would split the difference through that.

So this is sometimes called a soldier style, where you just put the rocks up kind of randomly and filled in with the mortar throughout.

The mortar that they used is a combination of sand and lime.

The lime is probably native.

I'm not sure where they obtained that.

Some of them may have shipped in because they could in 1890.

The railroad was here, but I see in John Fenton Pratt's ledgers where he talks about buying a wagon load of native lime.

But oddly enough he used the exact right mixture or recipe for this mortar, for this sort of rock.

Because where this was wet originally when they quarried it out.

It still will absorb moisture, and this sand and lime mortar in here that holds it together, that is breathable.

It's very soft but it's harder than rock.

So if we use modern sort of concrete or cement that we would use in the sidewalk or a curb along the street, it's tougher than the rock.

So if the building would settle that, the land would settle, it would crack the rock instead of in the mortar because the rock is softer than this.

So unbeknownst to them, they used exactly the right stuff for the preservation of this building.

And we're really happy they did.

There are still historic stone houses around or elements of those stone houses in current houses, and some of them might be a pile of rubble.

Others are still standing and quite well because they've been lived in and taken care of.

With the English coming in the early days there were the Pratts and the Fosters.

They were friends in England, they were friends here in too, and they stuck together and worked together.

They partnered into a lot of stuff.

The Foster Brothers built a much bigger house.

Three houses that very much the same design, the Cottonwood Ranch, the Foster Brothers, James and Charles Foster and James Kirk all had stone houses.

The similarities of the three structures is that they all used a combination of the Ogalala the gray stone and the Smoky Hill chalk.

So they were very similar and you can see that they were probably built by the same group of people that helped each other out.

Hi, my name is Cheryl Schwarz.

My husband Tony and I and our family have lived in the James and Charles Foster house since 1994.

We received this photo album from the realtor who originally sold the house to my husband.

The original part of the house was just the main living room and the side room and then the upstairs and at some point they had added on a kitchen and it had a cellar attached to that that went into the hillside and eventually they added on a bathroom to the back of the house later on in the years, they put a stone porch on the front that had stone pillars.

They put a widow's walk on the top of that porch.

So there was a door that came out from the upstairs.

They could walk outside and just stand on top of the porch.

And the story of the widow's walk came from homes that were near the ocean and whose, women whose husbands were sailors and out to sea, they would use a widow's walk to, they would say, to watch the ships come back in and hope that that was their husband that was returning home.

And I'm not sure how a stone house in western Kansas got a widow's walk, but that's what it is.

And I think that's probably just a little part of their English heritage that they brought here with them.

It was abandoned in the eighties, I believe that's when people quit living in it all the time.

It had kind of just been a rental up until then.

Farmhands lived in it on and off.

A couple, a charming older couple.

When they retired from being a veterinarian in Hoxie, they bought this place.

I don't think the porch and the widow's walk above it was structurally sound.

So they did remove that.

And kind of one of the neat things is looking at the photo after they took up off that front porch is that it looked like it did much closer to when it was originally built.

And then they added on quite a bit of square footage that added on a kitchen and a bathroom and kind of a sun porch and stuff.

And then, you know, my husband and I have lived here with our four children over the years.

We've needed to have things changed also, we have a son in a wheelchair who is handicapped and we needed things to be handicapped accessible so that we could get around.

And we needed to have everything insulated a little bit better because at times we could feel a breeze coming in through the house to the front of the house when it was really cold in the winter.

So one of the things we needed to do was insulate it better.

And as we're tearing off the walls and getting back to the original part of the house, we could see what they had used to insulate around the windows.

And it was fascinating.

We started pulling out fabric, newspapers, just clothing.

So anything that they had on hand that they weren't using, they stuffed around the windows as insulation, like there's this apron.

This is just really neat.

The fabric is pretty amazing.

This is a Kansas City star and this is from February 1901.

So they were insulating these things after the house had already been built.

So I'm not sure how that all happened, but I'm assuming the clothes and all the newspapers went in the house as insulation about the same time.

And the papers all have 19 01 on them.

When people come over to visit, they're usually fascinated by how thick our walls are and how, how deep the window wells are.

So you can, you know, you can sit in every window of our house in the old part of the house.

You can just sit up there and read a book and the kids have when they've grown up, they've just gotten up in the windows with a pillow and read a book.

And we love living in this home.

It has been just awesome for us.

We love it.

We love that people know the history, that people want to come out and see the home because it was historic.

We appreciate the history and we try our best to make sure that we kind of know what the Foster brothers did, what they came out here for, what it took for them to build this house and do what they did out here in 1889.

It ties in with my family history and my maiden name is a Konrad and my family homesteaded, you know, a mile and a half from here.

So for me to be able to be here and that close, it's been pretty neat and very special to our family.

My kids absolutely love the idea of this house and all the history about it.

They're pretty proud of it.

When they have friends come out, it means a lot to them.

And I think it's just been a really special place to raise kids.