Masonry Magazine December 1997 Page. 20
Dark Hollow Limestone Quarry featuring eight steam donkey engines, circa. 1920s. Credit: Indiana Historical Society.
Rush County Courthouse, building in progress, first two stories complete, iron framing on portion of third story and clock tower, circa. 1897. Photo credit: Rush County Historical Society, Rushville, IN
The action of laying brick and block was much the same as it is now in the late 20th Century. Therefore, today's masons can surely empathize with their 19th Century counterparts as they tackled A.W. Rush and Son's plans for the Rush County Courthouse.
Two years earlier in 1894, Rush's Chicago-based architectural design firm had tested their own midwest adaptation of Richardsonian Romanesque on two northern Indiana county courthouses. Meeting with success in Pulaski and Fulton counties, the firm pulled out all the stops on its design of the Rush County Courthouse, making it the largest and most complex design of the three.
Illustrating the complexity of Rush's design and the requirement for precisely placed stones by the masons is writer Franklin McIlwain's description of the building's exterior in 1974. "Rising from a flaring base, the walls lean inward and, if extended high enough, would converge to produce a giant pyramid. The first story leans inward to a marked degree, but the second and third stories slope inward only at the rate of taper of the circular columns found on all sides of the building."
As if these tapering design nuances weren't sufficiently complex, consider the everyday obstacles these turn-of-the-century masons faced. Simply moving huge blocks of lime stone weighing 140 to 180 pounds per cubic foot around the construction site was an immense undertaking. But, as is the case today, ingenuity played a huge role in surmounting many of the masons' everyday obstacles.
McCormack & Co. laborers put ingenuity to the test by fashioning huge earthen ramps around the building's foundation using soil excavated from the Courthouse's basement. The ramps provided adequate height for the limestone to more easily reach the first, second, and third stories of the structure. Massive blocks of stone were towed up the earthen ramps on sledges, stone boats, or carts pulled by work horses, then hoisted into place by hand or through the use of an iron tenon known as a "Lewis."
Upon completion of the building, the remnants of these ingenuous ramps were leveled off, forever raising the Courthouse lawn several feet above street level and providing an earthen base from which the massive limestone structure rises.
As construction progressed on the first three floors, McCormack assigned Phil Wilk, the firm's youngest member and a former Rushville resident, the task of engineering unquestionably the most difficult section of the entire building to erect the clock tower reaching some 185' into the air.
Steam power was the only conceivable means that Wilk and his crew had of hoisting limestone blocks to their lofty perches. Employing methods used for decades in limestone quarries, Wilk's crew used steam 'donkey engines' consisting of an upright, side-fed boiler with attached cable drums that allowed hoisting cables to travel up and down inside a