Nancy D’Aversa of West Chicago decided to do some remodeling on her 1857 house on Washington Street. As she removed some old glued-down paneling, it brought some of the plaster with it. Then a mixture of sand and gravel that looked like deteriorated concrete poured out of the wall.
“I asked my husband, `Why would they pour concrete in the walls?’ ” D’Aversa said.
She found out later, when talking to LuAnn Bombard, director of the West Chicago City Museum, that she had stumbled upon a rare form of 19th Century building construction called grout or gravel wall.
“I got all excited when she told me about it,” Bombard said.
There are few examples of the construction method known to exist, some in Wisconsin, others in western Illinois and a few more out West. There is one other in West Chicago, a former carriage house on Galena Street.
According to an unpublished research paper by Floyd Mansberger and Carol Dyson, both of Springfield, the construction technique was developed by Joseph Goodrich in south central Wisconsin. It used locally available gravel and lime mortar, casting it between wooden forms that were later removed, similar to present-day poured concrete construction. Sometimes it used fill such as aggregate, oyster shells, furnace cinders, brickbats and cobblestones, the latter giving a building the appearance of a stone house. The layered rows of concrete were often then plastered over on the inside and out with another mortar mix. D’Aversa’s house had been covered with wood siding, so it was a total surprise when she unearthed the loose mortar.
