A couple of weeks before this trip, Dad was chainsawing on an old stump and he kept dulling his chainsaw blades. He
finally discovered the culprit - a small orange iron-ore rock was embedded inside the stump! The tree must of have grown
around the rock many years ago. Dad knew that his late friend, Don Hale, would have loved that story so he placed the
rock on "Don's Rock Tree."
I used a hammer & rock chisel to create roughly 40 cornerstones for our front
entrance project. It turns out that we are always looking for a good cornerstone while building the columns. You
never have enough of them. A stone really just needs to have one 90-degree corner on it to be a good cornerstone.
But it's very rare to find such a rock in the pile of quarry rocks, so you have to create them yourself. If you
"score" a rock on all four sides using the hammer & chisel, the stone will usually eventually crack down the score
line - creating two stones with at least one 90-degree corner. We've already made over 230 such cornerstones. We'll
need a total of 600 to build the eight columns.
During this trip, Dad and I added several layers of rock to one of our columns - building it up to the desired height of
5 feet (19 layers of rock). On our next trip we'll lift a heavy 26 x 26 inch rock "cap" to finish the column off. We had
the caps specialty cut for us, and they were delivered to Brushy Land a couple of weeks before this trip.
