While I cannot give you substantive feedback with regards to Stones vs. Logs, I can recommend a couple of books that I have read that will give you some ideas to consider.

Living Homes: Integrated Design and Construction
by Thomas J. Elpel

This book offers a glimpse, not heavy detail, into a number of alternative building systems including slipforming, log homes, etc. Well worth the read. You can check out his website at www.hollowtop.com for lots of alternative building resources and ideas.

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Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building With Slipforms (Paperback)
by Tomm Stanley

This one is primarily building with stone and discussion of thermal mass, etc. He built a pretty nice looking home that is referenced in the book.
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I have alot of stone on my property that I am considering incorporating into my log home (fireplace, wrappe columns, foundation, etc.)

skunker - I also live in the SA area, Helotes actually, (currently in King Salmon AK) and know/seen the homes you are talking about. Most are just facade, like the new brick homes you see, and are just a framed structure. You need to be careful if you are planning on building a completely rock house in SA. The southern exposure will sit in the sun 12 hours a day in the summer and then transfer all that heat back into the house all night.

A friend of mine has a stone faced house that he added onto. The new section does a good job of keeping the temp inside stable. The old section of the house has hot/cold spots (depends on the time of the year) due too the lack of insulation in the 80 year old construction. If a framed construction with a rock facade can show this kind of temp variations, I would hate to think what a completely rock construction would be like in south TX.

I love the book The Stonebuilder's Primer: Charles K. Long. It is funny and very informative. I think the biggest obstical in building with stone is having it readily available to retrieve and stockpile.

I'm going to be building in the Northeast, the southwestern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. There is alot of natural stone there but you don't see many stone houses. There are some, but mostly they are quarried stone. What you do see are alot of very old homes with natural stone foundations. Because the Adirondack environment gets plenty of snow and rain, stone foundations are better than wood right down to the ground. That's why when you look at the old and new Adirondack camp style architecture you see mostly stone foundations. Stone construction, I'm told is very labor intensive and time consuming. It takes a loooong time to build a stone house but it will last for a few hundred years. There is a stone house where my mom used to live on Long Island that was built in the 1600's when Northport was a whaling town called Cow Harbor. It is still lived in today.

My neighboring farm has a 180 year old, post colonial farmhouse that has the original stone foundation. The rest of the house is post and beam and when you look at the attic beams the pegs are still dry and tight. I can see that they have had to patch the foundation over the years but it still stands through winter after winter. Because I too would like a stone foundation, I'm considering taking a course at the local college that teaches the use of masonry in construction projects. I've amateurishly built sidewalks and patios at my house using a combination of brick and concrete and mosaic. They weren't perfect but people admired them greatly and they've held up over the years to foot traffic and wheelbarrow traffic. And since it can cost up to 10K$ to build a stone fireplace, I'd say it was in my financial best interest to learn how to do it my self. Criminy! If the colonists were able to do it without all the fancy construction stuff we have today, I can do it!

Hey Will, We are back in the log home building. call me 205-821-0341

Stewart