Ever since I was a kid, growing up in Newark (Wayne County), NY, I have loved historic cobblestone buildings. Teachers in junior and senior high schools would include them in classes, and with several excellent examples in and about the village, I was fascinated. I was aware of their beauty from a young age, and they were a part of my growing interest in history and historic buildings. These remarkable buildings were built using the eroded stones that filled the south shore of Lake Ontario and its tributaries, serving as distinctive building materials for houses and other buildings in central and western New York. The earliest cobblestone buildings in the region were built shortly after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and they remained popular into the 1850s and 1860s, with scattered examples from later in the century. Although cobblestone buildings can be found in several other states, primarily those that line the Great Lakes from New York to Wisconsin, central and western New York have by far the greatest concentration, with the several counties from Madison and Oneida in the east to Niagara and Erie in the west containing the vast majority of these buildings in America.
This region is extraordinarily fortunate to have the Cobblestone Museum, located in Albion, NY. Not only do they provide tours and information about their remarkable set of buildings, volunteers associated with the museum have generated an astonishing online database with up to date information about hundreds of buildings throughout the nation, whether still standing or not. I have drawn liberally from this database in the planning and execution of this project, and I remain grateful for their efforts.
My love for these regionally distinctive buildings was reignited when we moved to Syracuse in the early 2000s, and finally in 2025 I decided to begin recording them in photographs. I decided to document these buildings and structures in a consistent format, using large-format, 5″x7″ black and white film. The National Park Service has long stated its preference for this format for HABS/HAER photography, though I have always used 4×5. The use of 5×7 film and cameras has declined in recent decades relative to 4×5 and 8×10, but I have found the proportions of these negatives to be perfectly suited to architecture, whether shot vertically or horizontally. Enjoy these views of upstate New York’s most distinctive architectural type, and please check back for regular updates!