The Smithsonian Castle & Renwick’s Missing Gate Posts
Photographer: H. Byron Chambers, Washington DC
In the early 1980’s, it was determined that the Smithsonian Castle was incomplete. James Renwick Jr., the architect, never got around to placing the four gate posts he designed for the south entrance. That’s what someone discovered after going through Renwick’s plans and sketches. The Castle was more than 120 years old and no one ever knew that those posts were supposed to be there.
Someone gave me a call and asked if I could make them. At the time, Cathedral Stone was a stone mill. I wasn’t manufacturing mortars and cleaners and coatings yet. I was just a stonecutter.
That’s me in the above photograph, on the far left. In the middle is James Goode, the Director of the Smithsonian Castle, and the guy pointing at the wall is Constantine Seferlis, one of the best freehand stone carvers I’ve ever seen. Constantine and I worked together at the National Cathedral. Later, he went on to work for the Smithsonian Institute.
I still have one of Constantine’s pieces. Carved for the Washington DC Flower & Garden Show, I liked it so much I decided to keep it in my office.
Renwick’s plans showed four gate posts for the Castle’s south entrance. Each fourteen feet tall and fifty-four inches square. They were big.
The original stone for the Castle was Seneca Creek Sandstone, quarried from and milled at the Seneca Quarry in Montgomery County, Maryland. The Smithsonian Institute got permission from the National Park Service (jurisdiction was with Maryland, D.C., and Virginia) to use stone from the Seneca Quarry. But we couldn’t quarry any stone; we could only use what was lying around on the ground — just a bunch of old boulders, irregular and cracked.
We took ten dump trucks and a bulldozer out there for our first run. Getting to the quarry site was rough going; it was like a jungle, thick with grapevines hanging everywhere. We needed to make a path from the main road down to where the stone was, but the National Park Service said we couldn’t cut down any tree bigger than four inches in diameter. So our “road” was full of twists and turns winding through the trees. And the snakes… They were everywhere! Terrified, the truck drivers refused to get out of their trucks, so me, James, and Constantine had to do most of the walking.
As soon as I started working with the stone, I realized why all of it was tossed aside at Seneca Quarry. In addition to all the fractures we were dealing with, the stone was hard — I mean granite hard. I had a stone saw that would cut 32 inches deep into anything I put in front of it. But when that saw blade bit into the Seneca Creek Sandstone, it seized, the ten horsepower motor stopped cold, and sparks flew 25 feet.
So we raised the blade a few inches. A few inches more. And a few inches more. Finally, we could make a cut — 2 inches deep. Not even close to the 32 inches we wanted. I took one of the big boulders and shipped it off to Indiana, to the guys who manufactured the saw blades we used. I told them to make me something that could cut the Seneca Creek Sandstone. They sent me back the best blade they could come up with; it cut 12 inches deep.
We went through five or six of those blades to get all of the stone cut for the four Renwick gate posts.
The project took us about three years to finish. We all had other things that sometimes needed our attention, but it took a bit of time to get that job done.
The photograph above was taken at about the midpoint of the project. I know this because of the sketches on the wall. Those sketches are blowups of the Smithsonian sketches. When we finished a piece, we would color it in on the sketch.
The location of the photograph is Reed Street, NE, Washington, D.C., my first stone plant and where Cathedral Stone started.
Below is a photograph of the finished Renwick gate posts at the Smithsonian Castle.
Smithsonian Castle, Renwick’s Gate Posts
By Dennis Rude, Stonecutter & Owner, Cathedral Stone Products
