Casa Grande Ruins

Casa Grande Ruins was an adobe restoration workshop that I co-led for Cornerstones Community Partnerships at Casa Grande National Monument in Arizona. We restored a section of an adobe boundary wall which was built by the CCC in the 1930s. Various volunteers helped make adobe blocks and build the wall. We employed a single-wythe (12 inch wide) adobe wall technique using natural adobe bricks and mortar. This is the largest adobe block size I have ever used - 12" x 18" x 4" with a dry weight of 54 pounds per block! All of the adobe blocks used for this phase of the project (about 500) were made on site by hand.