A Mini-Assay about Brownstone, Graves, and early New England
If you're from southern New England like me, you've probably seen these very old-looking, tan-brown headstones in your local cemetery, assuming your town was founded sometime before roughly 1800. If you've also worked in one of those cemeteries like I have, you've also probably been told to never touch these ones because they'll fall apart. These old graves are made from brownstone, a Triassic-Jurrassic sandstone more familiar to some as the tan & brown (and occasionally reddish) stones used in many mid-19th & early 20th-century buildings in Northeast cities like NYC & Boston.
Brownstone became the material of choice for many stones due to the ease of engraving, as like many sandstones it is relatively soft & malleable, in contrast to harder stones such as gneiss which require much more effort & time to work. More importantly, it could also be easily sourced, & the large deposits located through central Connecticut & today's Pioneer Valley made it a ready material for local masons & engravers. Portland, Connecticut served as an especially important source for brownstone throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries up until the flooding of the quarry caused by the Great New England Hurricane in 1938. Today, the quarries are still flooded but operate as a popular water park, with small-scale quarrying continuing to provide material to resurface historic buildings.
Back to the graves, the 18th century progressed, Puritan settlers in New England would begin to incorporate artistry into headstones. These engravings most often featured winged skulls or cherubs, representative (to my understanding at the least) of the departure of the deceased's soul to Heaven. This motif became most prominent around the mid-to-late 18th century, largely disappearing alongside Puritanism itself by the middle of the next century.
I mentioned briefly that Portland's quarries are still used at a small scale to maintain historic buildings. Jumping off that to close this out: Why did brownstone fall out of favor? While aesthetically pleasing & easy to source, brownstone is a form of sandstone, composed of compressed layers of sedimentary material. This makes it easily broken & very vulnerable to weathering, eroding quickly & becoming extremely brittle with time. This is especially true of headstones, & many headstones today have long since broken like the one shown above, with much care needed to ensure the remaining ones are not broken accidentally. As tools improved, materials become more available, and the country grew, most of the advantages which brownstone offered from a practical standpoint were lost, the the material saw a gradual decline in use in exchange for sturdier materials which could stand the test of time - After all, nobody wants to have the grave of their loved one destroyed, even by the passage of time.
