RENOVATIONS to the Providence Arcade may soon expose a feature of this landmark building that has not been visible for many years. Eight feet up a granite column facing the Old Time Smoke Shoppe on Westminster Street is a circle carved with the initials “J.O.,” for Joseph Olney, and the date “1827.” Olney left his mark on the stone when he quarried and shaped the columns and then delivered them to the site — with one colossal mishap.

In 1826, Providence architects Russell Warren and James Bucklin developed plans for an enclosed shopping mall in the newly fashionable Greek Revival style, with grand entrances designed to resemble temple fronts on Westminster and Weybosset streets. Each entrance was to be supported by six granite columns, each 24 feet high. The architects called for the central shafts of each of these 12 columns to be monoliths, single stones cut in 21-foot lengths.

Until the 1820s no one in America had produced architectural stonework with blocks of this size and weight. In antiquity classical columns were created in shorter segments assembled to produce a finished shaft. In 1820s New England, developments in transportation technology made it possible to build monumental structures in granite. For instance, to construct the Bunker Hill Monument, Boston architect Solomon Willard devised a railway system to haul granite blocks from the quarry in Quincy to ships on the Neponset River for transport to the building site in Charlestown.

By 1825, architect Alexander Parris built Quincy Market by moving columns in single pieces on boats along a new canal linking quarries in Chelmsford to the Boston waterfront. The ability to transport large pieces of stone stimulated the development of other technologies to quarry, lift and shape granite and marble. Still, when Bucklin and Warren designed the Providence Arcade in 1827, no one had successfully tried to cut and transport a single granite shaft 21 feet long.

When Joseph Olney took up the challenge posed by the architects, he faced two problems. He had to wrest the stone from the ground in one piece, and then shape it without breaking it. Granite is strong in compression and makes excellent vertical columns; however, it is weak in tension and a long thin shaft of granite can crack if unduly stressed as it is being extracted and dressed to size. Olney also had to move a dozen finished columns eight miles along dirt roads to the construction site without bogging down in mud or crashing through a bridge.

Joseph Olney used stone from granite outcroppings on Bare Rock Ledge in Johnston, north of what is known today as Graniteville, where the vestiges of this quarried ledge can be seen on Pine Hill Road between Putnam Pike and Greenville Avenue. Laboring through the summer of 1827, he and his crew cut 12 blocks from the hillside, drilling lines of holes along seams in the rock, and driving iron wedges into the holes until fissures opened and the stone faces split from the ledge. The crew shaped these rough blocks of stone into smooth shafts tapering from three feet wide at the bottom to 30 inches at the top. Smaller blocks of stone were carved to create bases and capitals in the classic Ionic style specified by the architects. When assembled at the building site, the capitals, bases and shafts would form finished columns a total of 24 feet high.

As the work progressed and the stonecutters finished dressing the rough quarried stone, they made a disheartening discovery. The quarrymen had drilled too far into the granite while extracting the shaft from the ledge, leaving holes too deep to be smoothed away in the last stages of shaping the finished surface. Declared unsuitable, the damaged column was put aside unfinished. There was enough stone left in Olney’s exposed ledge to yield one more block, and so the crew cut a 13th piece from the same vein to match the others in color and texture.

Meanwhile, Joseph Olney assembled a team of 12 pairs of oxen to haul the columns to Providence. Docile, and more powerful than draft horses, oxen were used to haul the heaviest loads. Stone from Bare Rock Ledge weighs about 165 pounds per cubic foot, so the granite shafts, after being trimmed to their finished dimensions, weighed about 24,000 pounds each — heavy enough to sink the most rugged cart into soft dirt roads and to collapse the bridges across the Woonasquatucket River, which lay between Bare Rock Ledge and the construction site on Westminster and Weybosset streets.

Olney addressed the problem of the cart getting mired in the mud by deciding to haul the columns to the building site on custom-built wagons during the winter when the roads were frozen hard. He then plotted a route to bypass the Woonasquatucket River. The granite would travel down Greenville Avenue to Manton, then down Killingly Street to Hartford Avenue into Olneyville. From there the oxen would pull the cart over Weybosset Street to the construction site. By staying west of the Woonasquatucket until it turned and flowed east at Olneyville, James Olney avoided crossing any bridges with the unwieldy cart and its heavy loads.

Transporting the huge columns on icy roads was not without consequences. As the crew was maneuvering one of the shafts onto the sledge, it shifted, rolled, slid out of its cradle, hit the ground, and cracked in half. A 14th column could not be secured from the original quarry on Bare Rock Ledge and opening a second quarry was impractical. The discarded shaft with the scar from the quarrymen’s errant drill hole was the only alternative. Joseph Olney shaped the damaged section into a three-inch circle, and formed a round stone plug to fill the hole. When he was through he claimed his clever bit of virtuoso repair by signing the solid stone plug, “J.O. 1827.”

The task of driving the team of 24 oxen went to Olney’s son, Benjamin, who successfully navigated the huge, delicate pieces of granite from Bare Hill Ledge to Providence, where builders erected a derrick on the construction site and lifted each stone into place on its base. The salvaged column was placed at the easterly side of the Westminster Street entrance, with its patch facing away from public view. One hundred and eighty-one years later Joseph Olney’s deft repair and carved initials can still be seen there.

Robert P. Emlen is university curator and senior lecturer in American Civilization at Brown University.