NEW SCOTLAND – David Zwack enjoys being his own boss. "I agree with myself at least half the time, anyway," Zwack said with a smile.
Zwack operates a decorative stone business from his Zwack Lane property at the foot of the Helderbergs in New Scotland. His only employees are Slate, Shale, and Limestone – his three "rugged" mules.
Mules are "much stronger than horses," Zwack said. They are "four-legged Cadillacs," he joked.

On a sweltering July afternoon, Zwack stepped out of his office – a quaint cabin with a stuffed black bear from Alberta poised at the entrance – to show The Enterprise around his stone yard.

Stonework, a variety of plants, and tables for customers to take in the beauty of the landscape surround the entrance to the yard.

The yard itself sits on a floor of limestone. Pallets of rocks of all shapes and sizes fill its surface. Zwack extracts limestone from his Indian Ledge Road property, located up the hill from the yard.

Zwack doesn’t consider his a mining operation and successfully argued that point with the town’s zoning board to get a use variance. (See related story.)
He also sells colonial-blue wall stone, tumbled bluestone, bluestone, fieldstone, granites, quartzite, and fossil stone from around New York State. "If I don’t have it, I can get it," Zwack said.
"Anything unusual I usually pick," he said of his taste for stone.

Like a shoe store
His business "is like a shoe store, he said. "If you only have one type of shoe, no one’s going to buy anything."
Customers often call him and request a certain kind of stone, he said. If he were to tell them he didn’t have what they were looking for, that would be the end of the conversation, he said. He instead tells prospective customers to "come on up." Most of the time, he said, they end up going for the limestone, regardless of what type of stone they may have originally inquired about.

Zwack spends most weekdays removing and delivering stone, and spends Saturdays around the yard to show his products and answer questions for customers.
He sells mostly limestone, he said. "I try to push my own stone," he admitted.

Zwack has been selling stone from the property since the 1970s, but it has been his full-time job since the early 1990s, he said.

When Zwack began the operation, he had an agreement with Howard Luscomb, the Indian Ledge Road property’s previous owner. He started selling stone for extra money while working other jobs, he said.

He was hauling stone off his Zwack Lane property when he approached Luscomb and made a deal with him to remove stone from his property, as it was easier to extract there, he said.

Zwack purchased the property after Luscomb died, and began his business.
"When I first started, I had no equipment," Zwack said. "I’d hook a mule onto the rock and get it where I could get it out," he said.

Limestone weighs 185 pounds per cubic foot, but that is no problem for the mule that bears its name, Zwack said.
Limestone, who is nearly 30 years old and has only one eye, is "as strong as an ox," said Zwack. "Actually, he’s probably stronger," he added.
"They’ve got incredible power," he said of his mules. Because of their hard teeth, mules tend to live longer than horses, Zwack said. A horse’s teeth will fall out, and cause the animal to starve to death, he said.

Zwack doesn’t work his mules too hard these days, as he now has a skid steer to easily move the stones.
"It’s a series of steps," Zwack said of transitioning from using mules to operating heavy equipment.
During the off-season, Zwack enjoys taking rides on one of his "four-legged Cadillacs" through the New Scotland countryside, he said.

Natural stone
Zwack sells only natural stone; "Anything man-made I don’t sell," he said.
"All this limestone sits on the ground," Zwack explained. "I don’t have to blast, I just pick pieces off the ground," he said.

The majority of his customers are landscapers. When residents come in looking for stone, and for someone to do the work at their homes, he said, he suggests the landscapers that do business with him. He keeps business cards of the various landscapers to distribute to customers, he said.
"I try to get business for the guys that buy from me," said Zwack.

The stone that Zwack removes from his property varies in size, he said. From the smallest piece needed for a stonewall to a rock that is two feet high by 20 feet wide – it can be found in Zwack’s stone yard.
Zwack takes extra care when handling the stones so as not to mark them, he said, or "do anything to make them look like they were moved."
All the stone "comes out naturally," he said. He also takes pride in installing the rocks "in the same way it looked when I took them out," he said.
If a stone is "real big," Zwack said, he drills into it, inserts a tapered wedge, and hits it with a sledgehammer to split it.
"Nothing hurts ever," 52-year-old Zwack said, adding that he should probably "knock on wood." Though he does extensive manual labor daily, he has no aches, pains, or gripes about it.

In addition to his decorative stone business, Zwack also operates a nuisance wildlife removal business.
"I’ve been doing that for a long time," he said of the wildlife aspect of his business.

He is most commonly called upon to deal with skunks, he said. Raccoons are also a familiar complaint, he added.

As numerous chipmunks scurried around the yard just outside his office, Zwack again used the shoe-store analogy.
It’s like a shoe-store salesman who doesn’t have shoes for his children, he said. "I’m the nuisance wildlife guy who can’t get the chipmunks out of his office."