Loading…
10
Rant: found out the old courthouse steps in my town took 11 guys 9 days to finish by hand
Was killing time at the library downtown waiting on a pour to set and picked up a local history book from 1987 about the courthouse. There's a whole page on the steps out front, poured in 1923, and it says 11 finishers worked 9 days straight on them because there was no pump truck and they had to bucket everything up from the street. I've walked over those steps a hundred times and never once thought about it, now I can't stop looking at the tool marks on the edges. Anybody else ever stumble on the story behind an old slab in their town and feel kinda small about their own work?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
ray_mitchell26d ago
Something like that happened to me with the old train depot platform over on 3rd. Book said a crew of eight laid all that brick in the dead of summer, 1911, and they let it cure for weeks before anything rolled over it. Now I catch myself running my hand along the mortar lines whenever I walk past, just thinking about some guy sweating buckets in that heat. What helped me was taking a few pics of the tool marks and weird little things nobody else notices, keeps the story with me somehow. Makes a guy stop rushing his own pours, that's for sure.
3