papercrete after the form is slipped to
the next section of wall. Slipforming
allows the papercrete to be immediately
applied to the structure, eliminating the
need for mortar, facilitating plaster and
cutting down the endless waiting of dry
time.
Block making has its advantages, too.
It takes more material to make block
forms than slip forms, and once poured
papercrete blocks can take two weeks or
more to fully cure before they can final-
ly be set into a wall. Then the mortar
still has to be made and the blocks actu-
ally set, and a block wall takes more plas-
ter to finish. But blocks are a great way
to make papercrete in small quantities
over time, if the builder lacks a means of
quantity production. If you can only
pour enough papercrete to make half a
dozen blocks in a go, slipforming isn’t
really an option, but making and storing
blocks works very well.
The two methods work well in com-
bination. Slipforming is a quicker, more
efficient way of building, to a point.
When the wall is over the builder’s head,
however, pouring wet papercrete into a
form becomes an arduous task in the
absence of some very expensive, very
specialized pumping equipment. At this
point, having a quantity of blocks ready
to go is an advantage. Dry papercrete
blocks are very light compared to tradi-
tional blocks. A seven-pound papercrete
block’s adobe counterpart would weigh
upwards of 40 pounds, for
example.With the roof supported by a
continued from page 9
for a while, I was wore out.
I posted the rock to a Facebook
group called Cold West. This is a pretty
savvy group of historians and
researchers, their main interest being
Old West history. I was promptly con-
nected with Mike Gardner out of Utah.
Mike went down a completely different
trail than the rest of us had. He applied
genealogy to the Mystery of Esau’s Rock.
He promptly messaged me and said he
had located a feller in “IRELAND.” I
knew from personal experience the Irish
were sheepherders, many had settled the
Eastern Oregon desert country where I
grew up. They had originally come to
herd sheep for large sheep ranches, more
or less as indentured servants. Also thou-
steel structure, and properly tied to a
concrete foundation, mixing and match-
ing these methods makes it possible to
finish a wall or structure without too
cal than concrete, which costs about
$125 for a cubic yard. If you’re building
your own papercrete project with
your own labor, it’s a great material for
Na Balom at La Loma del C hivo, a sculptural domed papercrete house, brings an air of
A rabian Nights to Far W est Texas
many backaches.
Portland cement costs about $12 for
a 94 pound bag, and this will make a
quarter to a third of a cubic yard of
material. Since the other ingredients are
used paper, used glass and water, this
makes papercrete much more economi- building a home on a restrictive budget.
Papercrete is labor intensive, mostly
because there isn’t an easy method for
pulping and mixing huge amounts of it.
But it’s a rewarding labor. It makes for a
quiet building site, one without the buzz
and hum of saws and compressors. I use
sands of Irish had been used to work lay-
ing the tracks for our nation’s first rail-
roads. And Americans drink a couple of
million gallons of Green Beer every St.
Patrick’s day. So Mike had me back in
Ireland, for the third time during my
quest to solve the mysteries of Esau’s
Rock. I was in a hurry to turn this
around and get back to Texas, where the
rock had originally been discovered.
Mike stepped up to the plate and
promptly hit a home run, knocking the
ball out of the park. Mike had located an
Irish stone carver who had been born in
1861 and immigrated to the United
States in 1880. The gentleman’s name
was Philip (Cullen) Coni. The Texas and
Pacific Railroad sought out stone carvers
and stone masons for cutting tunnels
and building crossings and trestles. The
Railroad hauled Irish laborers in by the
box car load, trying to meet their grant requirements to satisfy Government
officials.
Another resource, Daniel Patterson,
tells us a number of Scot/Irish headstone
carvers left the East and settled in Texas.
It appears that Phillip Coni was on the
Pecos River around the time the Texas &
Pacific was spanning the Pecos Canyon
with a trestle. Phillip Coni was also list-
ed as a teamster and freighter. He may
have been hauling wool and mohair to
railroad shipping points for shipment to
the Wakefield Rattan Company at
Wakefield, Texas. With over 6,620,000
sheep in the Trans Pecos and West Texas
country in 1880, hauling wool would
have been a good way of making a
living.
There are still some unanswered
questions about Esau’s Rock... why was
it carved? I do not buy into the “Practice
Rock” school of thought. This work was
my glove-shrouded hands a lot, touch-
ing every aspect of the house, feeling and
testing its thickness and textures. It
makes for many hours of quiet contem-
plation, zen in its repetition.
It’s not a material that lends itself to
sharp angles and perfect geometric
forms. It shrinks and shapes itself unpre-
dictably, due to the different kinds of
paper that go into the mix, and I find it’s
best to let it make its own shapes and
just go with it. It’s a sculptural, fluid
material, and as the walls emerge from
the foundation it looks more like an
ancient excavation than a new building,
strata of different colors and textures
piled on themselves like the layers in an
archaeological dig. I always feel a little
sad when the time comes to plaster over
the raw walls.
Papercrete is still largely untested,
unregulated and totally inconsistent.
There are as many recipes and methods
as there are builders, and a good propor-
tion of them live and build here in the
Big Bend. Like any material, it has its
attendant frustrations and shortfalls. But
what I like the most about it is the idea
that anyone can take a great pile of
something utterly worthless, literal
garbage, and transform it into some-
thing as immensely valuable as a home,
by adding only a little human energy
and ingenuity. And those are things we
also have in abundance out here, in Far
West Texas.
large and carved for a reason. Why the
salutation Farewell D.’Ave? Esau’s Rock
was left unfinished, quickly and crudely
signed...we don’t know why. Was it a
memorial or a headstone? We are sure
we know who did it and approximately
when, the rest is up to you. We may
never know the exact location of Esau
Nelson’s historic find, as everyone
involved with the original discovery has
passed on. But this has been an exciting
Texas-sized mystery to be a part of.
Next, I think I will try to find out
what happened to the 1168 Coni and
that fleet of ships which never returned
to Port in Naples, Italy.
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2018
27