He huffed and huffed and knocked the house down, certainly not if the house was built of cobblestones. Cobblestone house building was a folk art that flourished in upstate New York from 1825 until the Civil War in 1860. Many of the more than 700 cobblestone houses that were built survive today, a testament to their fine craftsmanship. .

To build your cobblestone house, you will need 5 main components: pavers, soft lime mortar, wood for windows and doors, cut stone blocks for quoins, lintels and windowsills, and lots of cheap labor. Let’s take them one at a time, assuming the cheap labor is you, your family, friends, relatives, and anyone else you can convince to do manual labor for $ 1.00 to $ 1.50 per day.

The first step is to collect the cobblestones. This can take several years. Cobblestones are small fist-sized stones deposited by glaciers that swept from the north millennia ago. The rough-shaped ones can be collected from agricultural fields or the round ones, washed by the lake, can be collected along the shore of Lake Ontario. You will need more than 14,000 pavers, so start cracking. As the manly work of stone collecting progresses, women and children can keep busy sorting the stones by size and color. You’ll want to use the finest, smoothest, and similar-sized stones on the front of your house, and save the rougher, odd-sized stones for the back, sides, and inside of the walls.

While this progresses, you better start preparing the soft lime mortar. Don’t skimp and use Portland cement. It dries too fast and will pull out the pavers as it dries. Soft lime mortar is made of lime, sand, and water. Find limestone (calcium carbonate) or dolomite (magnesium carbonate) and break it into pieces. Burn it inside piles of logs for 2 to 3 days to create quicklime. Add water to the quicklime to create a hydrated lime mud.

Mix 5 to 9 bushels of sand to 1 bushel of lime mud. Age the mortar in an earthen pit covered by sand or cow dung for up to a year.

A lot of trees fell. They will have to be hand-carved to build the doors and windows, each custom-made to fit a specific opening. Also, look for a quarry where you can get limestone or sandstone blocks for the corners of your building (quoins) and as structural support over doors and windows (lintels) and under windows (sils).

Now the fun begins. Begin by setting the stones into walls 18 to 20 inches thick. Build the wall with rubble stone, faced by cobblestones. Use elongated or triangular shaped stones to tie the pavers to the rubble wall. Use the soft lime mortar as a glue, dressing up with straight ridges between the horizontal and vertical rows of pavers. Build about 3 rows (or rows) per day so the mortar has time to slowly start to set. The mortar will take 35 years to fully harden. Place the carved stone blocks in the corners to create quoins. To finish the interior, apply horsehair plaster to the stone.

Once the walls are above reach, you will need to build scaffolding by burying posts in the ground 6 to 8 feet from the wall and tying the wall studs to the posts with hickory witches. Next, lay boards on the studs to provide a building platform. As the walls go up, you will have to repeatedly raise the height of the scaffold. Place a crane and tackle on the highest post to lift pavers and mortar buckets.

Hand-build your windows and doors to fit every opening and handcrafted trusses for your roof. Winter is a great time to do much of your carpentry work. Depending on how many workers you have and your skill level, it can be done in a year. The construction process will most likely take about 3 years.

When you are done, you will have a beautiful home that will stand for centuries. Go see for yourself. A new guide called “Cobblestone Quest – Road Tours of New York’s Historic Buildings” (Footprint Press, http://www.footprintpress.com, 1-800-431-1579) offers 17 self-guided car or bike tours to see the diversity of cobblestone buildings clustered within a 65-mile radius of Rochester, New York, and nowhere else in the world.

“Cobblestone Quest: New York Historic Buildings Road Tours”

By Rich & Sue Freeman

17 self-guided car or bike tours to learn history and observe the diversity of unique cobblestone buildings in Western New York State.

http://www.footprintpress.com/Cobblestone/CobblestonePreview.htm

208 pages, 20 maps, 85 photos, indexed, softcover, 10 X 7 inches

Price: $ 19.95, ISBN # 1930480199

Footprint Press, Inc., http://www.footprintpress.com

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Photos Available: Email [email protected] or call 585-421-9383.