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Comments
Submitted by John Schelp on Wed, 11/11/2020 - 1:20pm
Just walked around the block, while waiting for my Grub order, and was intrigued with the stone retaining walls at 511 and 509 Gattis.
They're similar to some of the stone walls in the 1200 block of Clarendon St, where a number of Italian stonecutter families lived. Both streets have walls using Duke stone (from Orange Co) and others have a darker stone. Most intriguing is the almost fanciful mortar between the stones in these different walls on Gattis and Clarendon -- echoes of the mortar you see in the walls of Duke Chapel and other West Campus buildings where so many Italian stonecutters, masons, carpenters and others built Duke's new campus... just up the hill from Gattis Street.
More background and photos of Italian stonecutters can be found here https://www.oldwestdurham.org/history/duke-stonecutters.html
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