No stonewalling a man's project: Retired neurosurgeon wraps up 500-foot stone wall in 5 years

Akron Beacon Journal (MCT) - Dr. Richard Zahn needed a retirement project.

Five years and 500 feet of stone wall later, he finished.

Zahn's wall zigzags across his property, a once densely wooded plot that he thinned out and turned into a tree-shaded, park-like yard.

Planters he built into the wall hold pink and white impatiens that add splashes of color.

He even built three shorter, curved walls to border a fire pit.

"It was something to do when you retire," said Zahn, a former neurosurgeon who set down his scalpel in 2000. "You know, you don't know what to do. You get carried away."

His original intention was to build a barrier to keep the leaves from blowing up the slope behind his house and into the yard. But he left an opening in the center, and the leaves just came right through.

So he had to reconfigure the wall and rebuild part of what he'd already done. Zahn, 74, built the wall a bit at a time, using a wheelbarrow to haul rocks from the hillside behind the house.

People who heard about the project told him he was crazy.

"You know, that's no easy job, pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones up a hillside," he said.

He'd never built anything like it, so he learned as he went. He used a dry-stack method, because he worked in small sections and figured the mortar would have dried before he could haul the next load of stones up the hill.

Eventually his neighbor at the bottom of the hill came to the rescue with his front-end loader, which he used to bring loads of stones up the hill. There's still a scattering of rocks waiting to be used someplace. Zahn's pleased with his handiwork, but it's left him with a problem.

"Now I have to figure out what to do next," he said.

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© 2008, Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio).