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Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Stone carver feels honored to work on Reagans tomb |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 11 June 2004 |
June 11, 2004
The artisan uses simple tools to inscribe walls at final resting spot
DARYL KELLEY
The morning after Ronald Reagan died, 82-year-old stone carver Nathen Blackwell got a wake-up call from the presidential library near Simi Valley, Calif.
Library officials were scrambling to prepare the hilltop burial site personally chosen by the nation's 40th president as his final resting place. They wanted to know how to replace a discolored bronze presidential seal mounted on a limestone wall with a black granite one Blackwell had carved.
"They wanted it up by Friday," said Blackwell, an English-born craftsman who lives in Ventura, Calif., and who has painstakingly cut large letters into the stone walls of the presidential library for years. "This seal will not color or change for 10,000 years. I guarantee it."
Sunday's task was the first in a series of assignments the stone carver expects in coming weeks as he helps complete the Reagan memorial.
"I'm just looking forward to doing this for such an important person," said Blackwell as he held with muscular hands a 3-pound silver-headed hammer with which he executes his most precise cuts. "Ronald Reagan was a wonderful person. I just wish we could have another president like him."
At the top of Blackwell's agenda is the carving of inscriptions on Reagan's headstone, the centerpiece of a 20-foot-wide, horseshoe-shaped memorial site where a crypt will hold the remains of Reagan and eventually his wife, Nancy.
The headstone, a Georgian gray granite, is stored in a library basement and will not be set until after today's burial, Blackwell said. At a minimum, the Reagans' names and dates of their births and deaths will be inscribed on it.
Then, sometime in the future, the curved limestone wall that defines the memorial and blocks the public's view of it, may be encased with a granite of tans and browns to protect against deterioration, said library Executive Director R. Duke Blackwood.
It will require an expert stone carver to inscribe on the new wall the quotation already cut into the old one, an excerpt from Reagan's comments when he opened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in 1991:
"I know in my heart that man is good
That what is right will always eventually triumph
And there is purpose and worth to each and every life."
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/8894655.htm |
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