Minister Robert Campbell - On Chapel Hill rocks (clip)

Minister Robert Campbell (RC): …and in-laws help do that.

Kathryn Wall (KW): So what is a grapevine joint?

Robert Campbell: A grapevine joint—it looked like a bead. And then you have what you called the cobb where it shapes around the rock to give the rock more standing in the rock wall itself. One of the notable ones, if you’re coming off campus and you are going towards Pittsboro, right there on Purefoy, I think you call it Purefoy Road, just past Merritt’s Grocery Store, there is an apartment complex there to your right and there is a rock wall as you pull up into the parking lot. My Uncle Nathaniel, we called him Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill, Uncle Walt, Uncle William, Henry, Handy, and myself and I’m thinking my cousin Gloria, like my grandfather was teaching all of us how to be a part of the work that he was doing. She also helped put that wall together. She also made a different mixture of concrete, well cement, really cement. It was cement that they used on that wall with a mixture of lime in it. And so, but the thing there is a rock in there, I mean, it’s huge. It had to weigh a couple hundred pounds and back in the day we didn’t have what you call a forklift but Uncle William and Uncle Walter put together and Dede Brittian put together an incline with a pulley system. That’s how we got the rocks in the wall. And so, ingenuity comes with construction and they were very detrimental in some of the things that we done especially when we were building some of walls and some of the houses. Our scaffolding was a lot different than the scaffolding that we have today. And so, we have to build our own scaffolding and it had to be able hold the mortar mix, as well as the bricks and the stones and so sometimes we had the vehicle that we had to carry stuff around and sometimes we didn’t and so sometimes we had to build things on the fly.

George Barrett (GB): Where would you get the rocks from?

RC: Well sometimes the rocks came as far as from Pittsboro and some of them came … Mr. … I’m trying to think of his name. Well, he stayed on Sunset Drive, Warren Jones’ father. What was his name? I forget his name, but he did a lot of landscaping and sometimes he would collect the rocks and pile them up on his property and he would sell them for little or nothing and so there’s a mixture of Chatham stone and some of the, we call them Chapel Hill rocks. It’s a mixture of different type of stones in several of the walls and houses around Chapel Hill.