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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 09 March 2004 |
By J.J. HENSLEY
March 6, 2004
Gravestone engraving by human beings is, by most accounts, a dying art. Much of the work today is done in factories by machines. But a few generations ago, the work was done by skilled craftsmen armed with chisels who were determined to mold the block of granite before them into a work of art.
Some of that art still can be seen today in cemeteries all over the country, including Valley View Cemetery, and some artisans still are molding blocks of granite and marble -albeit mostly with sandblasters and stencils instead of a hammer and chisel - to make a memorial that family members can pay tribute to for generations to come.
Tim Sturdevant occupies that role in Garden City. It's a position he inherited from his father before him, and one his father learned from Sturdevant's grandfather. Sturdevant said his dad made it through the depression selling monuments with his grandfather out of their garage.
"I grew up in it," Sturdevant said.
That's why walking through a graveyard with him is like being escorted through an art gallery with a curator. Sturdevant points out the subtle and sometimes strange touches that define his work and are a point of pride for him, as they would be for any artist.
Sturdevant can tell which companies did which stones, and proudly points out some of his own work, like the detailed image of Christ on a five-inch crucifix at the end of a rosary and etched into a large, white-marble stone; or the horses moving a house requested by the family of a deceased home-mover. He also made a pyramid gravestone for a woman once who thought it might bring her dead husband back to life.
Sturdevant also will show off the old style work, often done with a hammer and chisel, like the square-raised chisel that's common in older graves, like that of Andrew Sabine. There are stories that go with each of these, too.
The Sabine stone took two teams of horses to pull it up to the cemetery from the depot, Sturdevant said, and once they placed it in the cemetery it couldn't be moved because it's so large and heavy. The person that crafted the stone chipped away at the solid granite block for hours, he said, like an artist working with a block of clay, to create a finished product that might look simple but is beautiful in the eyes of craftsmen.
Much of the work Sturdevant does today consists of sandblasting death dates on tombstones, using the blasting equipment his father created and stencils Sturdevant makes on an old machine of his own, or by computer. Though once or twice a year, he said, he has to chisel a number in an old tombstone to match the rest of the lettering and numbering. It takes between two and four hours to do the lettering with that method, he said, vs. the 20 to 40 minutes the process takes with a sandblaster.
"It's quicker now," Sturdevant said. "My dad, it would take him two weeks just to letter the stone."
His father made his own stencil by melting brick and pouring it over the gravestone, Sturdevant said. After the brick cooled, they would carve the letters into the melted brick, break those parts out and sandblast in those areas. Now, there's a sheet cut to the size of the stone that engravers lay over the stone to use as a stencil.
For a long time, Sturdevant said, there was a fear of quality engravers meeting the fate of their old tools and becoming extinct. The 52-year old man has worked in the industry for more than 30 years and recalled a shop where he worked in Minnesota where the letter carver was in his 70s. The foreman talked the older man into teaching him the craft, Sturdevant said, but not everyone's that lucky. He had to go outside of his family for the first time in three generations to find the person who could one day take over for him.
"My son's not interested in it," Sturdevant said, so he's training 37-year-old Kelly Stevenson from Holcomb to continue the craft.
Another family, in Ness City, does the bulk of the work with the stones in their own shop, where they do everything but "cut the granites," as Russell Blake puts it. His son-in-law, Kevin Stoecklein, started the Ness City Monument Co. in 1991 and Blake's worked there for the past few years, since he retired from his job with the government.
He said he didn't know much about tombstone design when he started, but learned much of what he knows now through, "on-the-job training."
"You learn something every day," Blake said. "You pick up different techniques and look at others' work. You go to the cemetery and see what's out there."
The company is more renowned for its work with limestone rock signs, Blake said, like the one it made that stands in front of Sandhill Orthopedic and Sports Medicine, 101 E. Fulton St. He said the company got into making the granite monuments because there was no one else in the area working on them at the time, and there still aren't many in rural Kansas, he said.
It takes an average of two to three hours to do the design work on one of the granite stones at Ness City Monument, and another two to three hours to do the actual work on the stone, Blake said, though they had one recently that took about eight hours because of the size of the stone and the intricacy of the design.
Juanita Fellers, of Greene-Fellers Funeral Home and Monuments in Syracuse, has Wilbert Monument of Parsons do most of the work for tombstones she uses. Craftsmen from that company come to Syracuse every six to eight weeks, she said, to do sandblasting on monuments.
Fellers said there is another woman who does detailed designs for some of the stones by using a diamond etcher to draw in the granite.
"I can mail her a picture of this truck, or this horse, and she creates a masterpiece drawing of the photo, and she gets it perfect," Fellers said. The drawing is returned to Syracuse, where the family can approve it or request changes, which the artist makes and sends back. Once the design is approved by the family "she sits down at a table with the granite and will sketch the drawing on the granite," she said.
"It's a skill," she said, and one the artists have to take very seriously.
"When we design, we take a lot of time," she said. "You do everything your very best (because) it's going to be out there for a long time."
http://www.gctelegram.com/news/2004/march/6/story3.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.” T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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