This claim has been been made and repeated often since the 1960s. While it would seem to fit more or less time-wise, it actually doesn't really hold water in terms of a skill set or job opportunities available in their field.
Building cobblestone houses is undoubtedly a very special skill set, even an art form. One would classify it as "folk art" really, but still a very sophisticated type of folk art. Just the skill and imagination required to select and arrange rounded stones in the various decorative arrangements as these master craftsmen did, required both incredible talent and much imagination. They must have been the cream of the crop in terms of the building crafts. It is incredibly fussy work, a true art form.
A canal stone mason is someone completely different. He is part of an early industrial craft where there was much demand for canal locks, aqueducts and viaducts in the nascent transportation industry, not to mention giant stone factories and shop buildings. This skill set involved a chain of craftsmen working on major projects : a stone block cutter, a stone block trimmer, and a stone block mason, using limestone exclusively. The latter craftsmen used cranes and pulleys, engineering drawings and supervision, and of course hydraulic cement in the case of canal locks.
There simply is no connection between the two skill sets, other than the fact that they were masons. Most likely, these stone masons would have gone on to other transportation and industrial projects elsewhere, such as the plentiful factory buildings that resulted from the Erie Canal building, or more logically the surge of canal lock building that went on in New York State's branch canal system or the Pennsylvania's Main Line canal in the 1830s and 1840s, amongst others, even into the 1850s. In other words, these canal masons had more than enough work to do after 1825 in their field of expertise.
This brings up the second powerful argument against the transfer of canal stone masons to cobblestone building masons is that the 1830s and 1840s represent the peak of cobblestone building. This period also represents the peak of New York State branch canal stone masonry work, followed by the huge doubling and lengthening of locks, plus big aqueduct construction on the Erie Canal in the 1840s and 1850s. How could these so-called same stone masons be employed on two major local fronts simultaneously, focussing on specific canal projects while scattered across hill and dale in the surrounding countryside? The canal to house transfer theory simply does not hold water at all if one thinks about it a bit. The canal stone masons had more canal work than they could handle from 1825 to 1860, a full lifetime career in fact.
One is tempted to be facetious here and suggest that if you approached an Erie Canal stone mason in 1825, showed him a pile of nice cobblestones and asked him to build you a house with them, he would probably have picked up a few cobbles and thrown them at you along with a few choice swear words. It is time to definitively jettison this bad theory for once and for all. It has been mindlessly repeated far too long already. Let's bury it under a cobblestone grave monument!
'Native' and 'Immigration' Theories
So where did the cobblestone masons come from then? Two more probable theories suggest themselves to us. We could call one the Native theory and the other the Immigrant theory.
The Native theory, held by many and yet to be proven, is that native-born house masons from New England, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, all census-proven sources for migrants to Upstate New York in the early 19th century, areas where fieldstone houses were abundant, somehow became interested in the plentiful cobblestones found in heaps of glacial till in Upstate New York (where the continental glaciers halted 20,000 years ago); and the even more perfectly rounded cobblestones found along the southern shores of Lake Ontario.
Intrigued by the plentiful source, these native-born fieldstone artisanal house builders experimented with the cobblestones and learned how to master this new technique using the smaller more rounded stones. But it would have been a skill set that developed locally because of the plentiful availability of the resource (well-rounded cobbles). This theory at least is plausible. Only a census tracking of the known cobblestone masons to these migration sources might lend this theory some credibility.
The Immigration theory is not really known, but refers to the origin of cobblestone building in England. This is a regional vernacular masonry technique germane to the Essex and Sussex regions in south-east England. These people had been practicing this skill for centuries (same source: glacial till at the edge of the continental ice sheet full of rounded stones). It is also known from the census research that after the War of 1812 (starting in 1815), there was a surge of migration from England to the US and Canada, many arriving directly, others crossing the very permeable border along the St. Lawrence River. In other words, British immigrants were encouraged to come to Canada, especially in light of the War of 1812, but once arrived, you couldn't stop them from passing into the United States where economic opportunities were far greater, especially in neighboring New York. This immigration leakage is well documented in Canadian migration literature.
This theory also has yet to be proven and can only be run to ground by detailed census work proving that known cobblestone builders in New York were from England, via Canada or not. Of course, the truth could be a combination of the two, where perhaps some English masons started applying the technique and native-born masons quickly picked it up and pushed the technique beyond what had been done in England. Only pure research (a great thesis project suggests itself here) can run this theory to ground definitively. For now, they will serve as the most plausible sources for such a unique regional skill.
What is undeniable is that cobblestone houses of the sophistication and development level found in this very localized part of New York State (Niagara to Utica, but mostly around Rochester area), is unique. It is a testament as to what an incredible place Upstate New York must have been in the 1810-1860 period and beyond. Besides those unique cobblestone houses, one also finds the best Greek Revival houses and the best Italian Villas (especially the Tuscan villa type) ever seen anywhere, and in huge quantity. And let's not forget that other unique building type, the octagon houses, which are almost exclusively from Upstate New York as well. These remarkable houses are a testament to the prosperity and dynamism of Upstate New York due largely to the success of the Erie Canal (1825) and the great railroad network established by all the inter-linked ancestors of the New York Central Railroad in 1841 (Boston and New York to Buffalo and beyond by the 1850s).
The amazing house builders of New York State, during the 1815-1890 period deserve special recognition and perhaps none more so than the cobblestone masons of 1815-1860. This is a very precious heritage and every remaining cobblestone building, whether a house, barn, school, church, tavern, shop, hops dryer, railroad pump house, cemetery mausoleum or monument deserves special recognition and treatment. This blog, along with all the published work done on cobblestones since the 1960s, help this process along.
¹ Professor David Hanna is a specialist in heritage studies, vernacular architecture and transportation history at the University of Quebec at Montreal.