Building on Fitz Henry Lane's meticulous renditions of field stone walls at what is now the Cape Ann Museum Green, the Museum recently completed a 500 feet long, 5000 square foot wall along its Poplar Street and Washington Street boundaries. Utilizing stones original to this historic site, the wall was built by Peter Giordano, Sr., and a team of artisans and is an integral feature at CAM Green, framing the open green space as part of new landscaping at the campus. ■

To learn more about Cape Ann granite, check out “The Stones of the Quarries” a short documentary from filmmaker Rob Apse.

While Cape Ann is well known for its tradition of land and seascape painting, artists who pursued a different kind of subject matter also flourished here during the early 20th century. And the region’s granite quarrying industry may have helped their cause in an unexpected way.

A number of the nation’s finest painters and sculptors of the human figure once called Cape Ann home, including Paul Manship, Ellen Day Hale, Charles Grafly, Gabrielle deVeaux Clements, Walker Hancock, Leon Kroll and George Demetrios. Interestingly, many of these artists settled in the northern neighborhoods of Lanesville, Folly Cove and Pigeon Cove, drawn by the promise of a quiet studio at the outer extremity of Boston’s North Shore. But what else made these neighborhoods different? Interviewed in 1978, Leon Kroll’s wife Genevieve suggested that the local Finnish community, and their perception of nudity, may have played a role. 

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For those who have visited the Granite Gallery on the Cape Ann Museum’s lower level, the extensive display of historical quarrying materials may already be a familiar favorite. But how many know about the person responsible for getting such a significant collection off the ground? Her name is Barbara Erkkila (1918-2013), a long-time Gloucester resident whose meticulous research over the years, astute artifact gathering, and generous donation of these resources to the Museum in the 1990s has helped the Museum tell the fascinating story of one of the most important industries in Cape Ann’s history.

This video captures a conversation with Erkkila at the Museum in 2007 that was moderated by Sinikka Nogelo in which Erkkila entertains the audience with stories from her childhood growing up in Lanesville and her long career as a feature writer and editor at the Gloucester Daily Times. Erkkila’s sparkling personality brings life to reminiscences about such varied topics as painting a kitchen with “wagon wheel blue,” ever-evolving methods of stone extraction, and the youthful joy of waving to the engineer on Polyphemus II, one of the trains that carted the cut granite from the quarries to nearby wharves where it was loaded on boats and then taken away to locations up and down the east coast.

In addition to her objects, the Cape Ann Museum Library is fortunate to have a significant collection of Erkkila’s quarry maps, photographs, and related ephemera, all of which are detailed in the Barbara Erkkila Papers finding aid, as well as a copy of her 1980 book, Hammers on Stone: The History of Cape Ann Granite. ■

The Cape Ann Museum is always committed to finding ways to improve the accessibility of our content. In particular, we have been hard at work transcribing all of the lectures found in the CAM Video Vault. While we're not there yet, we're getting closer by the day, thanks in large part to our dedicated volunteers. 

We've begun the process of creating closed captions for these lectures so that viewers can read along with the text throughout the video. This video marks the commencement of this initiative, and we look forward to sharing more in the near future.