Dry stone wall expert explains his work at NOTL gateway project

Sharp shards of limestone fly from the edge of Menno Braam’s chisel behind the black-screened fence at the Mississagua-Queen Streets intersection. He has just shaped the next stone to be placed onto the new gateway project welcoming visitors to Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

After about three weeks of solitary work under the hot summer sun, the new structure is beginning to take shape. Though much work has been completed, Braam maintains there is still much left to go. 

The Toronto-area  resident and proprietor of Whistling Dwarf Stonework has been chipping away stone by stone through a 40-tonne shipment of limestone sourced from a Buckhorn-area quarry by Upper Canada Stone, a business owned by NOTL resident Perry Hartwick. Each piece is carefully chosen for its size, shape and colour quality. 

“As soon as the stone was dropped on site I was scanning for the largest stones, which go on the bottom of the wall,” Braam explains. “I also look for stones with solid 90-degree shapes. I hold them for the corners. It helps me to establish each corner, to make it strong and sturdy.”

The founding board member of the non-profit organization Dry Stone Canada has been practising the trade for 20 years, and working on his own for the last 15. 

His expertise as a certified professional member and instructor with the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain has seen him involved in projects such as the Legacy dry stone bridge in Perth, Ontario, the Northumberland Hospital entranceway wall in Cobourg, Ontario and the Dry Stone Amphitheater at Hart House Farm for the University of Toronto. 

Locally, Braam also worked with Dean McLellan on a dry stone wall blacksmith building at the Willowbank School of Restoration Arts.

It was his reputation that led to Braam’s selection to complete the NOTL project, funded by the Gerald Kowalchuk Family Foundation.

“The town decided last summer to pre-qualify three general contractors who were capable of doing this,” Kowalchuk says of the design created by Brad Smith of Burlington’s Seferian Design Group. “All three contractors who went to tender chose Menno to build it. From our point of view, that was a feeling of great comfort.”

Working with Smith’s design has gone quite smoothly for Braam. 

“I had to make sure that they understood the dimensions of the thickness of the wall,” he explains. “The thickness changes the taller the wall gets. That wasn’t accounted for in the original drawing. The ‘batter’ of the wall, how it leans into itself on both sides, requires it to be thicker at the bottom than it is at the top for structural reasons.”

That design creates a centre of gravity, so the wall doesn’t lean one way or the other. That’s important, of course, as there is no mortar holding the stones together.

“It just wants to settle and strengthen over time,” continues Braam. “That wasn’t accounted for in the design. Only a dry stone waller would account for that. Overall, it’s been great working with their design, to see it come to life.”

Braam may be a whistler, but he’s hardly a dwarf. On the contrary, at about 6’2” tall and 260 pounds, he is about the size one would expect from someone who will be moving tonnes and tonnes of stone over an approximately eight-week period. 

He holds up his large hands, whic not surprisingly are covered in limestone dust and calloused from years of chiseling away at his trade. 

Besides the stone on site, there’s not much else there, not a power tool in the vicinity. Braam shows The Local his brick hammer, fitted with carbide on its impact zone. He also has a hammer and a chisel, and a wheelbarrow that he uses to ease the pressure on his back while he moves the larger stones. And he has a marquee tent that he can move over the wall to block the sun. 

“I don’t wear a hat,” he says. “I find I sweat a lot more when I do.”

When he arrived on location, the first step for Braam was to paint lines to mark the footprint of the structure. Then, he erected wooden frames at each end and corner, attached to each other via string to help him to keep each row level from end to end.

In his initial scanning of the 40 tonne delivery Braam also searched for longer stones to use as ‘through stones’.

“If you think of this as two walls leaning against each other,” he says, “the through stones go from front to back, acting like a stitch. I have two rows of those laid down already.”

From there, he adds, it’s working from biggest to smallest as he builds his way up. There’s about a tonne of stone in every linear foot.

“There’s structural reasoning for a lot of the stylistic choices,” says Braam. “I don’t like to use anything smaller than two inches (high), because anything less than that won’t be strong enough to last. For this project, the bottom layer is three inches, and I’ll go to about two-and-a-half at the top.”

Looking from above at the most recently completed row, there are smaller bits of stone sitting between the larger pieces. Braam explains that those pieces are not just rubble that he picked up but actually pieces that he cut to fit into those crevices. 

“It’s all fitted, and wedged in,” he explains. “They help to lock it all together, but not as rigidly as mortar would do. Think of all of these joints as expansion joints, which allow these walls to breathe and move with our frost. It’s referred to as ‘harding’.”

Menno picks up a stone and demonstrates how he trims a piece to fit correctly on the wall. 

“It really comes down to practice,” he says of getting the clean cut on each piece. “It’s all about the angle that you use to cut. You can anticipate where the stone will break and control it.”

As he gets closer to the top of the wall, where he will begin to create the gateway arch and the circular section that will hold the town crest, he expects the job to get more intricate and time-consuming. There may be the need for another delivery from Upper Canada Stone.

“I work with Perry’s stone more than anyone else’s,” says Braam. “The workability is just fantastic. I also really just enjoy the look of it. And Perry has been a great force in the dry stone walling world. He’s helped out on a lot of things.” 

With the screened-out fence hiding Braam’s work, passersby would hardly think anything is going on there. But the 46-year-old craftsman is there every day for about seven hours, adamant as he is that he takes on only one job at a time, working it from start to finish before moving on to his next project. After NOTL, he’s off to Halifax. 

“I’ll be working with the association to help restore a dry stone wall at a little church in Halifax,” he says. “The wall was first built in the 1850s. Last year we rebuilt half of it, and this year we’re going back to finish it in two stages.”

Until then, though, he’ll continue to work in solitude, practising a craft that he refers to as somewhat romantic, while he creates a lasting impression for local residents and future visitors to Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

Braam expects the gateway to be ready for its unveiling in about four or five week’s time.