Cavendish Inn — The Historic Glimmerstone Mansion in Cavendish, Vermont

History of Glimmerstone

The Leon Gay Family

In 1918 the Leon Gays bought “Glimmerstone,” one of the best examples in Vermont of houses built of native stone by native workmen in the years between 1840 and 1845.

Through his great-grandson Clark Wardner, who was one of the masons, the house bears the influence of Philip Wiedner (or Wardner) who emigrated in 1750 from Wurtenburg, Germany, where he learned the stonecutter’s trade and was eventually awarded the certificate of master mason by the Nuremberg Guild of Masons. Clark Wardner had worked on King’s Chapel in Boston, and the work on “Glimmerstone” stands too as a memorial to a famous skill. The mortar was made from a native lime but by a zealously guarded secret formula, so that the mortar joint between the stones is as hard as the stone itself, well-nigh impervious to cracks.
	“Glimmerstone” had been built in 1844 by Nathaniel Fullerton, then manager of the local woolen mill. Five pair of oxen were kept busy all one winter, drawing the stone from a quarry a quarter of a mile away, the drivers receiving one dollar a day for their labor. The house takes its name from the silvery sheen of the gneiss formation and mica schist; the ledges were worked by opening a hole in the formation with a powder charge, so that the slabs could be split out easily to the necessary thickness.
Reference Neither WEALTH nor POVERTY: The History of the Woolen Mills of the Gay Brothers 1869–1944, Tunbridge *Cavendish Vermont By Janet Marie, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, Vermont, Anno Domini MCMXLIV.