The wedges are inserted first, then the center bar slipped between; thereafter any lifting pull on the three bars is bound to expand the lewis to fill the hole and lift the stone, for the hole is drilled wider at the bottom than at the top. With Solomon Willard’s well-rendered isometric drawing of each stone for a guide, the stonecutter dressed it, first selecting the best face for the “bed” (bottom) and hammered it to a plane surface, determined by shallow channels (chisel drafts) cut diagonally across the stone. From this surface, the stonecutter laid out the other faces, including the “build” (top), by his good mason’s square or template. The texture of the visible face was “tooled,” that is, the marks of the chisel remained visible. Quincy granite is a quality product, taking a high polish, but the builders of the Bunker Hill Monument desired no polish on their monument. Today, the surface of the monument shows faint, well-weathered lines, like those produced by the modern bushhammer, which has a head made of several thin steel plates bolted together, each sharpened to a cutting edge. In England during the period, flat iron bars with rough edges were in use to saw softer stone than granite, and at Quincy, Willard experimented with dressing machines. The conclusion may be drawn, however, that the stones which we now see on the monument were undoubtedly shaped to their present dimensions by hand. Today, 110 years after its capstone was put in place, the Bunker Hill Monument stands as an impressive testimonial to the conservative judgment of its designer, Loammi Baldwin, and the painstaking fidelity of the man who supervised its construction, Solomon Willard. An engineer familiar with its maintenance states that there is no evidence of settlement, and that a check by surveyor’s transit revealed no signs of misalignment. Its joints occasionally need pointing, the last pointing being performed about 20 years ago. Various iron or steel members of the observation chamber have had to be replaced. Its lightning rod has been in place for many years, but there is no readily available record to check whether the monument has ever been struck by lightning. With their empirical methods of design and their crude, mostly hand-operated, construction apparatus, our forebears built a sturdy structure, which, barring an earthquake, should last for centuries. _The Granite Railway_ On 7 October 1826, the first railroad in America started operation. This was the horse-operated Granite Railway, built to transport the stones for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarry in Quincy down to the Neponset River, a distance of nearly three miles. The track and cars of the railroad had been designed and built by a young engineer of 28, Gridley Bryant, whose Granite Railway project started him on a long career of achievement in the invention of equipment that played a major part in the rapid and successful development of the American railroad system.