Asheville is our only castle rock style split-face natural thin stone veneer.  Split-face refers to the interior part of the stone that is exposed when the stone is split with a hydraulic press. Asheville stone is unique in that the machine cutting process which creates the split-face does not lend itself to the large pieces typical of the castle rock style.  The hydraulic presses are usually used to break large sheets of quarried stone but with Asheville, smaller pieces of fieldstone are split.  The labor-intensive process involves five splits per piece (four to make the rectangle and one to expose the inner part of the stone).