THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Bluestone Sculptors Part One Harvey Fite

CATSKILL - Sculptors have been around for millennia. They go back at least to stone age times and are still around and still going strong. We have, in recent history, had a few very good ones - right here in our Catskills. Classical sculptures are carved into stone. All types of rock have been used throughout history but the one you are most likely to think of is marble. But we have no marble at all in our mountains. What we do have is bluestone and we have a lot of that. That’s why our region’s sculptors worked with it. Bluestone is a form of sandstone. That sand accumulated in today’s Catskills between 350 and 400 million years ago. It washed out of the Acadian Mountains which back then lay where the Berkshires are today. The bedrock of those mountains weathered and then they were eroded, turning into a quartz sand mixed with silt and clay. These sediments were deposited in stream channels and those deposits hardened into good sculpture quality stone. The quartz would have made the rock white; it was the silt and clay that made it a dirty “blue.” Do you think bluestone looks blue? We don’t either, but the word brownstone had already been claimed by people in New York City. (Brownstone is actually red but no matter.)

We understand that bluestone is tough stuff to sculpt; it puts up a fight so it’s hard to shape. Well, our local sculptors dealt with that problem by finding other ways to sculpt. The first of these was Harvey Fite (see our first photo, courtesy of Opus 40) who started out as a professor of art at Bard College. In 1938 he purchased 12 acres of old bluestone quarries near Woodstock. He designed and built a home there and moved in with his wife. A remarkable and influential event followed when he was invited to travel to Honduras in order to do repair work on some Mayan sculptures. He came to be impressed with what is called dry-stone construction.  Shaped stones are laid down, without cement or mortar to form a building or a work of art. Harvey must have quickly realized that he was sitting on quarries filled with just the right materials and he could do what the Mayans had done – form art from those materials. His life’s work had been inspired!

Harvey set about to commence a planned 40-year task – shaping his main quarry into a work of art. He did the work by hand and by himself. He fashioned terraces, staircases and hoisted up a remarkable stone monolith. It was all dry-stone construction. He never reached those 40 years but fell victim to a fatal accident in the quarry at year 37 and at age 72. Still, he had fashioned a truly remarkable sculpture. Today it’s a park or a preserve called Opus 40. That is something that you can go and see today. We have visited a number of times and written about it as well. It’s one of the best exposures of Devonian age rock in all the Catskills. Maybe you can come along sometime when Robert is leading a geology walk there. He’s doing four of them this summer. See https://opus40.org/education-environment/nature-walks/

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”