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Before going up Millstone Hill the crowd waited in a field for darkness to fall. As the long summer day trailed on, they twirled colored ribbons and tossed devil sticks in the air, a jam band played, and a woman braided her boyfriend’s hair. There were overpriced hot dogs and lasagna for sale but no beer. On one side of a length of caution tape, a couple on a blanket played Magic: The Gathering. On the other, a small huddle of silhouettes dressed in fire-resistant clothing stood beside a forge—later I learned that they were bronze-casters. They each carried a scoop on a long stick with which they removed molten metal from the forge and indecorously chucked it at a wall of plywood, sending sparks raining in the darkening blue sky until the whole wall was aflame. As the sun set and their outlines faded, the casters looked more like a society of dwarves performing the first in a series of ancient rites.

By ten o’clock the stars had emerged. A pair of scouts carrying tiki torches led the procession up the hill, followed by a band with bagpipes and drums. The dirt path out of the field gradually ascended into the woods, cool from all the naked rock. Ahead of us was the old Marr and Gordon granite quarry, dormant for more than a century, one of seventy-five open pits on this hill in Barre, Vermont. What remains is a wild hole, half regrown, exposing the innards of the mountain. Here there were thousands of candles, placed in the crevices of grout piles, and high pyramids of jagged waste stone that came to a point, covering Millstone Hill in smaller, false hills. We gathered on a reforested slope, looking down into the deep, narrowing, wet pit, from which pillars, paving stones, obelisks, columns, mausoleums, angels, urns, and innumerable headstones had first been extracted as raw chunks. In the daytime, the pale rock bears dark streaks of lichen and the deeper scars of extraction, now partially covered by pooled water in which some claim they’ve seen drowned cows. And always on the mountain is the sound: blasts from the active quarries nearby that travel for miles. In the crowd, a young girl turned to her mother and asked, “Is this the one near my school? Every day, the one I hear?”

At first, granite was evident in Barre in small scrapes where receding glaciers had exposed rock formations in the mountains. Early residents pried it out with wedges to make millstones. Following the arrival of the railroad and steam drills after 1875, the population of the small agricultural community more than tripled in ten years, the city teeming with an influx of men arriving from quarrying towns in Scotland, Italy, Canada, and later Spain to remove veins of granite that stretch miles deep. By the early twentieth century, Barre was Vermont’s most diverse city, 90 percent of its workforce was unionized, and anarchists attempted to assassinate the police chief. The work was dangerous, hard, and seasonal. Before the required installation of suction devices in 1936, the dusty granite sheds often sent their workers to early graves. Gradually, the city became known as the granite capital of the world.

The annual solstice party seemed somehow sacrilegious in light of Millstone Hill’s history as a worksite, where men had scrambled up and down ladders, their bodies sometimes maimed and made smaller under the weight of falling rock. “It was like burying yourself in a stone grave,” one quarryman’s widow recounted to a Works Progress Administration interviewer, “and hardly knowing there was a world and sun around you.” The cemeteries in Barre are full of headstones memorializing the workers who harvested them, complete with a mixture of religious iconography and more worldly carvings: pietàs and race cars, lovers appearing in clouds of cigarette smoke, cats and motorcycles, even stones that show their own sculptor at work, chisel held up to the staid surface of his grave. Now there are only about a dozen carvers left in the city who fashion monuments like these.

As the bagpipe escorts fell away from the path, other musicians appeared farther down—a flutist, a harpist. Deeper in the woods, a DJ spun beats with wildlife sounds next to a grout pile two stories high. I watched a couple dance after just meeting, then walk to the ledge above the quarry, its tall rocky sides reflected in the water below, looking as though they were about to kiss. Some people on the walk seemed drunk, others transfixed by the glowing lights and white-barked birch trees. The candlelit path dead-ended at an inscribed bust of Hephaestus that read god of blacksmiths, metalworkers, masonry, sculptors, volcanos and fire. Moths flitted with desperate abandon from the luminaries surrounding the gray god to the lit batons belonging to a pair of fire jugglers. As the procession exited the quarry, a woman became sick in the grass.

To get to Heather Milne Ritchie’s studio, I drove past a stretch of aged sheds, pulling over just before the road crept up toward the quarries. In Barre—pronounced “berry,” as in its nickname, “Scary Barre”—an entire industry remains preserved. The granite in the mountains, the tools that force it out, the trucks that carry it to the shops where it is carved into angels: these transformations of state happen here. In 1929, Vermont’s granite industry employed eighteen thousand people; now around eight hundred work in the trade. no loitering signs hang in empty storefronts amid a hardware store, the Two Loco Guys burrito shop, and Last Time Around Antiques. But the ornaments jut out; a granite lunch box and cup of coffee rest in perpetuity atop hunks of rock. A granite zipper snakes into an alleyway. Granite blocks dot the town and act as impromptu traffic cones, benches, or landscaping as if they fell off a truck, were pushed out of the roadway, and were left there.

Vermont, where I grew up, is not a very big state, and I’d known of Heather and her carvings before I met her. I lived just up the road on a Barre vegetable farm one summer, spending aimless weekends swimming in the old quarries and visiting the cemeteries. I liked how, in Barre, the memorial art seemed to spring up, rather unselfconsciously, right out of the ground; it served a clear purpose to commemorate the dead, and yet itself was fabulous, harking back to ancient Rome and the Etruscans. Surrounded by the hard plainness, the entire tableau quietly refused change. Barre always seemed wilder than the town where I was born, whose main industry is the comparatively clandestine manufacture of semiconductor chips. There are more woods and farms in Barre; broken-down machines languish in the quarries next to swimmers; the people are a mix of old families from the region, children of immigrants, and those who need to live close enough to the county courthouse to make their mandatory parole check-ins.

When I met Heather for the first time in June 2022, she told me that she was working at a greater clip than ever before, pushing out as many as five jobs a month as opposed to her usual one. Carvers across town were feeling the same surge. “We’re gonna be this busy for at least the next five years from the ricochet of COVID,” she told me. But the increase in business was not from COVID deaths themselves, she explained. It rather seemed to her that more people were planning ahead for their own mortality. It used to be that a shutdown would begin around Christmastime, with workers furloughed until March. Now Heather works through the winter.

I wanted to see how Barre, still an industry town, supports a rare type of vocational artist. It is a place that manufactures the passage of time for others yet itself seems to follow an older, slower clock.

Barre quarry workers splitting granite, early twentieth century
Courtesy Vermont Historical Society, Barre History Collection Picture File

Part of the younger generation of carvers, Heather looks less than her forty-eight years, with green eyes and an expressive mouth that curves up at the edges into a kind of smirk. Her hands are not what you might expect of a stone carver—overwrought with muscles, ballooned into something like catcher’s mitts—but are toned and precise like those I’ve seen on welders. As she moved around her studio, considering a giant slab of granite that would become a customer’s sarcophagus, I noticed pink flowers and green leaves tattooed across her waist.

Sylvain Metivier, a finisher, sat polishing an apple on his lunch break. “Used to be there were carvers in every shed when I started,” he told me. He began carving after completing a now-defunct stone-trades program in high school, and he has kept nearly the same schedule ever since. Sylvain and Heather have been working together for years—one of their early collaborations was a carving of St. Michael slaying a demon—and they keep their operations cleaved but close. “If I need help with a rose, she’ll do it,” Sylvain told me sweetly. Heather peeled two boiled eggs and wordlessly handed him one.

Since the spike in business began, the machines in Barre have hardly shut down, and some carvers have made enough money to buy new, more advanced replacements. “The machines are fast,” Heather said, “but they’re not faster than a man.” Some machines can more quickly make forms—a column, or other cylindrical features—but the finely tuned work of a suffering Christ or a marching soldier is relegated to the sculptors. And machine-made carvings still require a human’s touch to fix the imperfections. Memorials of lesser quality come from overseas. George Kurjanowicz, Heather’s mentor, told me that by 2008, when business dried up and a major quarry company laid off a third of its workers, many people were forgoing a $15,000 stone from a Barre carver for something cheaper from China or India. Customers would import $1,500 carvings and hire George to fix them—“just these gargoyle-looking things that really should have been dropped in Lake Champlain,” he said. The memorial business, after all, has a strange relationship to customer satisfaction. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an inferior product,” George told me, “because they’re not gonna come again.”

Heather had a backlog of miraculous-medal cameos to carve into gravestones. During my visit, a blocky outline had already been traced onto the stone, propped up at waist height, with a reference picture taped to it. Heather held a small diamond saw that released plumes of rock dust that were sucked into a hose, the clouds catching the overhead light, a crude approximation of the sun. I watched her approach two trapezoids that were to become Mary’s hands. With a red pencil she marked the outline and the finer fingers within. She stepped away, grabbed her saw, and sliced off a section. Suddenly the hint of a thumb appeared. Next she cut horizontally into the palm, then paused to look at her own cupped hand for reference. Then Heather marked each digit with a pencil, and began to carve between each finger, the gaps no wider than pieces of yarn, and drew out the knuckles. The hand was then as detailed as a glove, not yet skinlike, but with the faithful impression of a person within. Heather steadied the overhead light as she carved into the cuff of Mary’s sleeve, which pooled at her wrist. “It’s like you’re making an image almost seen through a veil,” she told me. “It’s emerging still.”

At an annual stone-sculpture exhibit on North Main Street, Heather displayed a torso bust of marble breasts, encompassing a sacred heart aflame with pink and turquoise fiber. for my dear friend tiki amber read a sticker affixed to the block it sat on. Tiki was one of Heather’s best friends; they met at a party at Heather’s house when they were in their twenties. Tiki died in August 2022 after eight years battling cancer, during which Heather helped take care of her. “She really possessed a sparkle,” Heather told me. That winter, she worked on Tiki’s gravestone, using a Salisbury pink granite, almost bright in comparison with Barre’s austere gray. The top would be an upside-down heart, and in a half-inch relief, she would go on to carve lily pads giving way to cattails down the sides, imitating Tiki’s own paintings, in a progression of the natural world, from water and fungi to flowers and dragonflies. It would be teeming with life.

On a tour of Barre’s E. L. Smith quarry, one of the deepest working granite quarries in the world, Roger, a thirty-five-year veteran of the operation, led us past piles of grout to a fence. We looked over it and down into the nearly six-hundred-foot-deep hole, where the machines and their sounds, the whine of the saws and the belch of dump trucks, were more readily apparent than any human presence. The quarry was not one deep hole but a series of descending plateaus. Plants clung to the rock that gave way to penetratingly blue water that had collected in the basin, the chalky granite dust turning the pool into a false image of glacial melt. Our guide told us that in 1970, when he began working in the hole, he was one of two hundred men. Today there are only thirteen. If they were to keep going at this rate, they could continue to quarry here for the next 4,500 years. Roger told us that the company that owns the quarry will not dig any deeper—the pressure builds the farther down they go, and could begin to crack the stone—so instead they shave away at the sides of the opening. These formations were created approximately 330 million years ago, as magma from below the mantle rose and cooled. The result is uniquely uniform plugs of hard, clean-breaking Barre granite, one of the densest of carvable rocks. It bears distinct smudges of white and coal-black shavings, marred by nicks of gray and glassy dots of quartz. Combined, these minerals give the stone an indistinct solidity, as if seen through a blurred lens. Its sparkle comes from the mica exposed by a carver’s chisel.

Almost two miles away, tucked behind a creamery, George keeps a studio in a corner of a cavernous building, with a concrete floor pocked by unpaved dirt patches. When I visited, his area of the space was perfectly tidy, and an orchestral movie score was playing defiantly loud. He shone a flashlight over a line of seven yet-to-be-started gravestones to show me the work he had waiting for him. “This is pretty much a standard execution of Christ that gets ordered and executed by me ad nauseam,” he said. “I do it like making doughnuts.” I asked him what it’s like to carve the same thing over and over. “It feels like the commute to work. You’ve been there so many times, the landscape is familiar, all you have to do is make sure you don’t go off the road.” The variations—a rose here, a heart there—are what make it bearable.

George arrived in Barre on a Sunday night in 1984 and had a job by Monday. He had been classically trained in sculpting in his native Poland, but he had never touched granite or its tools. He was hired by Frank Gaylord, a World War II combat-wounded paratrooper who created the column tableau for the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington. Frank taught him to carve the stone, dividing a slab in half and having George copy him. It took George a year to be able to produce a Madonna. After two years, he opened his own studio.

George’s business had boomed during the pandemic, like Heather’s. His normal turnaround on a job used to be two months; then he began having partially finished pieces on a seven-month backlog. Of the five or six apprentices he has taken on, three carve on their own, but this tradition is foundering. Barre lacks a lasting education model, and, as it is, teaching an apprentice takes paid hours out of the workday.

When I met with George in 2022, he was about to turn seventy and didn’t know whether he’d have the time to train anyone else. “I’m still functional,” he told me, “but I know that I have an expiration date coming up.” In front of me, George threaded a heart-shaped gravestone into the loops of a crane. “I don’t want a gravestone,” he went on. “I want to be cremated. Caskets and funerals and all of that . . . ” He trailed off. “Maybe if there’s family out there to mourn you.” He repeated what seems to be the prevailing sentiment among carvers I’ve met: “Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”

“It’s a vanity,” Giuliano Cecchinelli told me as we stood in Hope Cemetery. “You are born to die, you know?” It was too bright, so we stood in the shadow of a bush in order to view his own tombstone from a better angle. It featured himself as a boy carrying a bundle of sticks. His wife, already deceased, is at his feet in the carving, depicted as a young girl with her dog. “I never finished it, because I don’t care,” he explained. He didn’t want to give his best work to the town. (For his father, in contrast, he shipped a granite pietà all the way to Carrara, his hometown in Tuscany.) Giuliano got the plot in Barre for free from a man now buried a few feet over, and at seventy-nine he seemed more interested in how the carving would progress without him; he ordered the stone never to be washed, and lichen had begun to grow across it. “Nature gives a patina nobody can achieve, ” he said.

Giuliano is a small man, and in the cemetery he wore brown slacks and a brown beret. He began art school at eleven in Carrara. His experience of the Italian stone industry, rooted in a master-apprentice model, emphasized specialization—in drapery, flowers, the human form, lettering, design. Today, many Barre carvers are generalists who model directly onto the stone, creating more stylized likenesses than replications. Standing in the grass, he pretended to pluck a stone rose from a turn-of-the-century grave, kissing his fingers in appreciation. “You think they could make this today!” he scoffed. “It’s a joke.” He toed a series of footstones to show me how the lettering worsens as the death dates become more recent. Two generations of the best carvers to immigrate to Barre died of dust inhalation before they could pass on their skills. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Don Bullard the gravedigger here once affirmed to me. “I look at this out here like people see foliage,” Don said. He doesn’t pay particular attention to dates or names.

Giuliano showed me the stone he carved for Richard Cassavoy, a former co-worker at the granite shed where Giuliano still works, and his wife, Eva. It shows Eva seeing Richard off atop his motorcycle beside their wooden house, the whole scene surrounded by leafy trees, pine boughs, and a sky thick with clouds. Giuliano figured out how to make the indefinite grayness of the stone transform into each unique material: flesh, chrome, vapor. The trees are webbed with so many holes that they gain the shadowy depth of woods. The entire scene has the slight unreality of a dream, or a stolen view of heaven. “When you got it, you got it!” Giuliano said, elbowing me genially. He dreams about carving all the time. Thinking he’s at work, he’ll swing a hammer while he sleeps. That’s his favorite part, pounding away at the stone. What else would he do but sculpt? His body is shaped like a wedge.

Giuliano took me to the house he built. Before turning into the driveway, he showed me the bust he made of his wife. They met when she worked at Whelan’s, a drugstore in Barre where the carvers used to gather, adding grappa to their morning coffee. (Men would get together there and talk about their work, but now people punch in and out, working toward Thursday—payday.) The carving is of her on her deathbed, and it is sunk up to her collarbones in his front lawn. It is not beatific but rather immediate, his wife death-stricken. It was an answer to the age-old problem of the sculptor to capture life: here instead was the exact moment of extinguishment. “You see the tongue?” he asked me. “It’s stuck to the palate.” This happens when you die, he explained. He took photos to remember exactly how she looked. His children don’t like it in the front lawn, he tells me, but he doesn’t feel anything when he sees it.

There were statues artfully crammed throughout his house. A Virgin Mary hung from a treadmill. Two tomatoes sat ripening on the dining-room table, and pencil marks remained on the doorframe from his kids’ heights growing up, with a few low-down marks for their dog. We sat; at twelve-thirty, he poured me golden wine from a slim bottle. For himself, he poured Carlo Rossi out of a jug, the cheap stuff. The wine was the perfect thing after looking at so many rocks.

When Giuliano talks about sculpture, he moves his hands in the air, tracing ripples of waves, billows of clouds, the paths of planes and boats. He is constantly trying to catch movement, nature’s thrum, both in stone and in the nothingness in front of him. If anything, his faith lies in nature and his own gifted eyes. In a tree fallen across his lawn he sees a nude.

When I asked him to tell me more about Barre, he demurred. “I’m beyond thinking,” he said. “My brain hasn’t got any more to give to this crazy town, crazy city, crazy industry.” So instead, we gossiped. I asked him about the locally famous shooting of Elia Corti, one of the town’s great sculptors, in a 1903 scuffle between the anarchist and socialist factions of Italians at the labor hall, supposedly an accident by a blacksmith. Giuliano offered his theory that it was a purposeful hit. As a shop owner, he posited, Corti couldn’t really have been a proper anarchist. “The guy who shot him was a tool sharpener who he probably never thanked,” he said.

In November at the Busy Bubble Laundromat, people were talking about snow. Two guys showed each other ice-fishing videos while a man’s debit card was retrieved from an ATM with a pair of pliers, and visible out the window was a truck lot where eighteen-wheelers rested, loaded with gravestones to be delivered. Stevens Branch, a tributary of the Winooski River, wound darkly across the road. Sylvain told me the river rats that swim it are the size of bread loaves and eat their way into the old granite sheds along the water.

I was staying nearby in a robin’s-egg-blue house with my daughter and husband. The landlady inherited it from her grandfather, a crane operator at the quarry, and her grandmother, who also took in boarders. Barre now suffers from an emptiness recognizable in many of America’s small cities: a housing shortage, a main street emptied by big-box stores, an influx of drugs, the loss of jobs and the loss of life. Taped in the window of Basil’s Pizzeria and Restaurant downtown was a picture of Jefrey Cameron, who had worked there while living in Barre with his grandmother, along with his obituary: “29, peacefully lost his battle with addiction on June 5, 2020.” Placed next to it were now hiring signs and a missing-person poster.

A Barre funeral director told me that many of his funerals are for those who had died from overdoses, and that the problem is getting worse. Bodies are often collected from local hotels. Don Bullard, the gravedigger, being the natural next stop, said the city used to be fun, a place for acid and pot, but that it has since become a thruway for harder drugs. “It was just a good little granite town,” he said. “Once the granite lost its grip, they’re in trouble.” He seemed to be talking about everyone.

The granite industry may not be enough to hold Barre together, even if the earth is still rich in rock and people keep digging graves. How much can granite do? Some people are in crisis, others cosseted by jobs that pay, and all are folded into a diminished town where more rock is ferried out of the quarries and onto highways, sent away, leaving a bigger hole in the ground.

On a Thursday, payday at the sheds for most, I went to the Wayside, a 106-year-old diner. By five o’clock, it was crowded with families. Aprons hung from the ceiling like racing flags, the names of waitresses embroidered in yellow: peggy, connie, sue. The Zecchinelli family, which operated the restaurant, had the same fork, knife, and spoon carved into its headstone at Hope Cemetery as those on the granite plaque in the entrance of the restaurant. I sat in a booth with my husband, my old friend Rachael, and our babies. Rachael was building a house in the woods while staying in a converted sugar shack; when I lived in a cabin in Barre years ago, she lived in a tin camper on a nearby herb farm. We shared in the feeling of excess as the table swiftly crowded with plates: pork loin, meat loaf, fish-and-chips, Tater Tots, coleslaw, applesauce, french fries, beer, hot cider, maple-cream pie, carrot cake, homemade rolls. Kids dangled from high chairs around us, food hit the floor, men in snow boots trod heavily over brown carpeting. I held Rachael’s baby while she used the bathroom. Eating my buttered rolls with him in my arms, I could feel her in him so strongly, and he smelled good, like plants, like something new.

Everyone in the sheds had a long weekend for Veteran’s Day, coinciding with the start of deer season. Heather took me in her red Jeep to Green Mount Cemetery in Montpelier. We arrived at a hydrangea, still with a few papery blooms attached, under which lay a footstone of pink granite angled out of the ground. Tiki’s name was carved into it. Beside the name were a mushroom and a heart, which Heather added one afternoon with a portable Dremel saw. “I made this right before she died,” she told me. “I wanted it to be ready, because one of her worries was that no one would be ready for this. It was the best I could do while taking care of her.”

We got back in the car, putting our hands on the warm vents, and drove into town to wait outside the school for her then-fourteen-year-old daughter, Opal. She climbed in the back seat, strawberry-blond ponytail and book bag splayed around her, looking as if she had recently grown a few inches. She said that she read 182 books during the pandemic. As we crossed the Winooski, leaving Montpelier for Barre, Opal told her mom that she smelled “dusty and, like, gross.” Heather comes home tired at the end of the day, takes her boots off, gets the sediment out of her hair and the rocks out of her bra, and takes a shower. She says her memoir will be titled Stone Whore.

Heather’s house was built on a plot of family land bordering her sister’s property and a gun range, with twenty acres of woods trailing behind. Inside, she kept a fat cat. Her teenage son arrived home in snow boots, regarding me with a look of unhappy surprise before Heather took me upstairs to show me the birthing idols she had carved, one for each kid. Tiki’s bright floral paintings hung on the walls.

When Tiki was alive, she and Heather critiqued each other’s work, thrifted together, helped each other through rough patches. Heather wrote to me while working on Tiki’s gravestone that she was dreaming about her a lot. “My dreams are lucid,” she said. “Super ’normal’ stuff: hanging out, talking about paintings and gold thread, things we used to do, like our nail polish.” From a pile of clothes, Heather fished out a pink parka that had belonged to Tiki, having noticed I didn’t have a winter coat, and said that I should wear it while I was in Barre. She wears Tiki’s sweaters outside to feed the birds.

One morning, I smoked a joint on the porch of the blue house while it snowed, watching two men dressed in orange unload a buck at the big-game reporting station across the road, before walking around the city in Tiki’s coat. I passed a statue of an Italian stonecutter, its head and shoulders lined with snow; an extended-stay motel; and a granite couch modeled after a sofa in a former home near where Jiffy Mart now stands. A sense of people and objects that had disappeared hung around me in sharp relief. Maybe embracing this was the key to being here, I thought. The interiority of being high made it seem like I was on some kind of special mission, that things weren’t really dismal at all. I could feel the world scrape warmly against my skin.

In an old interview, the grandson of a stonecutter recalled how, at the end of the day, when things quieted down in Barre, you could still hear the saws running downtown. “You’d always have this noise,” he said. “It was a sh, sh, sh, echoing over the valley all the time.”

On my last morning in Barre, the baby and I looked out the window of the blue house, waiting for Heather to take us with her to buy tools from Bernie Scott, a local ninety-one-year-old toolmaker. Everything was cast anew in snow. Kids in mismatched snowsuits on a nearby hill tried to get a few more runs in on a single sled before the bus came. Heather arrived with coffees, and we walked down the street to Bernie’s garage, where he hunkered over a table of tools. He had big hands that made a papery sound when he moved his fingers. Heather held my baby and asked Bernie the price of different chisels, all standing in Chock Full o’Nuts cans, with the intention of buying a lot before it was too late. “Christmas is coming up,” she told him, knowing his wife would want something nice.

He told us that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could do this, retipping all the chisels for the Barre carvers.

“You gotta train somebody,” Heather said.

“Nobody wants to learn.”

Bernie started listing men from the sheds who had died, while my baby slept limply in Heather’s arms. Then Bernie asked if we knew the joke about the guy who bought his wife a gravestone for Christmas. The next year he didn’t get her a present, and she asked him why.

“I’m not going to buy you anything this year,” he said, “ ’cause you didn’t use what I got you last year.”