"The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." --Psalm 118:22
Robert Brownlee wrote his memoir in 1892 at the age of 79 from Napa Valley, so his recollections of events in Arkansas in the 1830s and 1840s are imperfect. But the scholar who edited and published the memoir notes that they're still pretty accurate.
For example, Speaker John Wilson stabbed Rep. Joseph J. Anthony to death on the floor of the Arkansas House of Representatives on Dec. 4, 1837. Brownlee says it happened the day before he arrived in Little Rock; he really arrived a few weeks later. Not bad.
Brownlee came to Little Rock with James McVicar, Samuel McMorrin, and John Cooper. The men had worked together on the North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh and traveled to Arkansas to work on the State House in Little Rock. The central part of the State House (where Wilson stabbed Anthony) was nearly complete, so the main work of McVicar & Co. (as the men had organized) was to quarry stone and lay the foundations for the east and west wings of the building.
Readers are welcome to correct me on this or any other matter, but as I understand it, a stone cutter (as Brownlee described himself) cuts stone at the quarry site or the construction site, while "stone mason" is a broader term for anyone who works in stone construction. Given that McVicar & Co. consisted of four partners, it seems that, in addition to cutting stone, Brownlee would have helped lay it.
It's not clear how many laborers McVicar & Co. hired to help lay the foundation of the wings of the State House. Free laborers or enslaved men hired out by their owners might have supplied help.
The walls of the State House are not made from stone, though the original plan might have called for it. Brick walls and columns are plastered over to give the appearance (from a distance) of marble. In the 1990s, the foundation was deemed insufficient (in some places it was no wider than the walls) and was replaced by concrete, a single 8-foot by 8-foot section at a time.
Brownlee mentions having worked on a wall "built partly around the State House." The only known candidate for a remaining section of that wall functions as a low retaining wall to the east of the Old State House, where the lawn meets Ashley Street.
"When the state concluded to build a penitentiary," Brownlee writes, McVicar & Co. got the job for the stone work. The penitentiary site was 92 acres on the beautiful hill west of town where our state Capitol now sits. When Brownlee passed through Staunton, Va., on his way to Arkansas in 1837, he took note of another institution situated on a beautiful hill: the Western State Lunatic Asylum. He recalled in 1892 that it "struck me forcibly at the time, as I had not seen anything of that kind before."
The penitentiary that Brownlee worked on, like the insane asylum that he saw, came to be because of the progressive thinking of the early 19th century, which grew out of the Enlightenment of the 18th. The technologies employed in early asylums (straitjackets, cold baths) were cruel, but were early manifestations of the idea that what we now call mental illness is a condition that can be treated. Likewise, conditions in the new penitentiaries were harsh, but the people designing and running them believed that criminals could be reformed.
The idea was no longer punishment or containment of transgressive behaviors; clients of the emerging penal and mental health complexes were to be the recipients of rehabilitation programmed by experts with beneficent intentions. Patients and prisoners alike were to receive care.
I doubt that Brownlee was hip to the new thinking. He seems to have believed in fixed character. Arkansas in 1837, he says, "was composed of the very worst class of men, murderers, counterfeiters, horse thieves, and all those who were compelled to leave their native state for their country's good."
It was "the resort of all cutthroats and escape-the-gallows crowd--murder on the street was a very common event."
But by the fall of 1838, he writes (I think he's compressing the chronology here), Little Rock at least was a better place. Not because the old residents changed, but because upright people showed up: "Mechanics of all grades were moving into town--bricklayers, plasterers, painters, carpenters, and printers--so that the rowdies had to behave themselves, or leave town."
In 1840, according to Brownlee, the bricklayers at the penitentiary "rushed" McVicar & Co. to quarry the stone for the windows and door jambs. (The stone is visible in photos of the penitentiary on the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.) By "rushed," I think he means that he and his company had to go 80 miles up the Arkansas River during the (most) malarial season when they would have preferred to wait for colder weather. Brownlee became extremely ill and his partner Cooper died.
Brownlee was able to return to Little Rock and recover. He managed to return to work and recalled, "I think we finished stone cutting between 1840 and 1842; therefore, we had nothing to do." He and his remaining partners took up with another Scotsman, John McHenry, who had a 1,432-acre farm about 10 miles southwest of Little Rock on the Southwest Trail.
I'll pick up Brownlee's story again soon at the Ten Mile House.
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. She appreciates mail from readers: brooke@restorationmapping.com.