For weeks this past summer, there was something just a little bit off about Adam Bennett’s commute.

Bennett, owner of Windham-based Colonial Stoneworks, couldn’t help but notice that the sign outside the brand new Windham High School was, let’s just say, aesthetically lacking.

“At a certain point I just felt like a high school that nice and that expensive deserved a better sign,” recalls Bennett, a Windham native and graduate of Salem High School.

While the sign’s lettered top may have passed muster – although, as Bennett pointed out, some of the original factory stickers still remained – the base was little more than an unfinished slab of rough concrete, complete with jutted-out iron clamps.

Towards the end of the summer, Bennett finally approached the school board with an offer they couldn’t refuse: he’d refurbish the base of the sign using his own materials. What’s more, he would do it free of charge.

“I just thought it would be nice to do something like that for the community,” said Bennett.

It took a few weeks, but Bennett eventually got the go-ahead from the school board. By October, he had hauled over the materials for the sign’s new base. He dug down a few inches, drilled some holes near the bottom of the original base, fastened some fresh rebar, before pouring in an 8-inch concrete lip all the way around.

Bennett then pieced together a brand new veneer of ornately-placed granite and other stones, in the process transforming the sign into one more befitting the new school’s clean, sturdy aura.

While as novel as it was creative, Bennett’s use of recycled and reclaimed materials is nothing new. Indeed, he’ll often source the stone for his clients’ projects right from their back yard – literally.

“I’ve had customers who do their own yard work and just collected a pile of stones over time, and a lot of times that stuff is usable,” he says.
For Bennett, the calculus is simple: Why pay for expensive pallets of stone from quarries as far afield as Pennsylvania – only to pay more for the shipping and unloading – when there’s plenty of high quality, native materials all around you?

According to Bennett, not only is scavenging for local materials less expensive in general; it’s also far less energy intensive, something that goes part and parcel with his burgeoning “green” approach to stonework.

And that’s just the beginning of Colonial’s green initiatives. Bennett puts biodiesel, made by a neighbor using waste vegetable oil, in all his diesel machinery and trucks, making every effort to use all other gasoline-powered machinery as seldom as possible. Bennett even installed his own on-site 500-gallon storage tank to store the biodiesel, meaning fewer trips to the pump to fill up.

At only 26, Bennett is in many ways the new kid on an industry block known as much for its grueling regimen as it is for its competitiveness.

“It’s definitely a competitive field, but in reality the guys who do dry stone work are a dying breed,” says Bennett, referring to stone-based projects that rely more on gravity and friction to hold a piece together than cement or mortar.

Though he’s only officially been in the stonework field a few years – he previously owned his own landscaping business –Bennett is determined to stick around a while.

“It’s a very New England craft, and being a native New Englander that part of it is easy to appreciate,” says Bennett. “But there aren’t really a lot of guys out there doing it, in part because it’s not something that can just be done in a day.”

“It’s more of an art form than just a trade or skill, and for me it’s always been more about the quality than the quantity.”