Brownstone Discovered

In 1889, the first of several large brownstone quarries opened in Sanford. Brownstone, a deep reddish brown sandstone, underlies Sanford and much of northern Lee County. Since the beginnings of settlement, the stone had been used by local builders for house foundations, chimneys, cemetery walls, and the like. In the mid-1800s, the engineers who built the Western Railroad through the area exploited the stone's decorative potential in their beautifully crafted culverts. Brownstone was quarried locally on a small commercial scale during the 1870s and 1880s.

In America's fast-growing cities, interest in architectural brownstone reached a fever pitch during the late nineteenth century, a period aptly christened the Brown Decades. Romanesque brownstone government buildings were built throughout North Carolina and elsewhere, and row after row of apartment buildings known as "brownstones" went up in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities. By the end of the 1880s, Sanford's enhanced rail connections enabled it to cater directly to this burgeoning national market. In 1889, the local press urged, "The people of Sanford owe it to themselves to have the brownstone quarries in a quarter mile of the depot operated. Let's agitate and force this excellent building stone upon the market. It is of the best in the U.S. and there is enough of it here to build a New York or Chicago." And indeed, in August 1889 a Philadelphia concern leased quarry sites from several landowners in the Sanford area.

In February 1890, W. H. Smith of Michigan, the contractor for a federal office building then under construction in Wilmington, leased a site southwest of the downtown and put twenty-five stonecutters to work. The stone was shipped to Wilmington on the newly completed Cape Fear & Yadkin Valley Railroad. African American stonecutters made up the majority of the workforce at the Smith quarry, as they did at most later Sanford quarries. The success of W. H. Smith's quarry inspired local landowners and northern capitalists to step up brownstone production. In June 1891, the Moore County Brownstone Company opened a quarry on a ninety-acre tract west of downtown. Sanford’s brownstone industry flourished through the turn of the century, but a shift in national taste away from the heavy Romanesque forms and rich coloration of the 1880s and 1890s toward the lighter, classical compositions popularized by the Columbian Exposition of 1893 gradually led to a slackening of demand for the local stone. Brownstone remained in use locally, for window lintels and other façade trim in downtown Sanford commercial buildings.

One of Lee County's architectural paradoxes is the virtual absence of sophisticated brownstone construction, despite the prevalence of brownstone quarrying. The Endor Iron Furnace and the Western Railroad used brownstone in the mid-1800s, but during the peak years of production, only the 1908 Lee County Courthouse and a handful of commercial buildings in downtown Sanford used brownstone in its dressed form. The stone was used with more frequency in Sanford landscaping. The front yard of the early-twentieth-century John R. Jones House at 402 Hawkins Avenue is bordered by a low brownstone wall punctuated by stone gate posts and short piers capped with pyramidal blocks, and a set of brownstone steps leads up to the house of quarry owner Roscoe E. Carrington at 214 Summitt Drive.