Barre Granite: The Stone and the Hands

By Ines Keane

Gray stone, hard as it gets. Granite is the hardest natural material after diamond, one Yankee magazine article says, and it took far more force to shape than marble. That is why Barre, Vermont, became a place for carvers.

The stone

The Times Argus, a Vermont newspaper, dates the formation of Barre granite to 330 million years ago. The Yankee magazine article calls the stone roughly 400 million years old. The two figures differ by about 70 million years, and we show both. A company blog from Rock of Ages describes the granite as Blue Gray, made of gray feldspar, black mica and gray-to-white quartz.

Early quarrying

The Times Argus timeline says that in the late 1700s and early 1800s stone masons, often part-time farmers, split granite boulders into building stones. It says that around the 1810s Robert Parker became the first professional stonecutter to quarry and work granite systematically in Barre. In the mid-1820s, it says, the first Millstone Hill quarry opened. Granite from two quarries went into the second Vermont State House in 1833 to 1837, and Barre granite was used again to rebuild it in 1859 after a fire.

The railroad

The Times Argus says the first railroad connection to the stone sheds came in 1875, as a branch from Montpelier, and that in 1888 and 1889 a railroad was built from the sheds up to the quarries. Rock of Ages says the quarries sat at about 1,025 feet, too steep for the railroad’s traction, and that an engineer proposed a switchback system that connected the quarries to the depot and led to an industry boom. The Times Argus says flatbed trucks replaced the railroad in the 1950s. The two accounts agree on 1875 and describe the hill railroad in different words, and we show both. We leave out the town’s bond amounts.

Who came to cut

The Times Argus says the first Scottish immigrants to own a granite shed arrived in 1880 and that by 1890 Scottish immigrants made up 20 percent of the town’s population. It says a wave of Italian stone workers came in the 1890s, mostly from the Viggiu granite area or the Carrara marble area. The Yankee article says Barre’s population grew from 2,206 in 1880 to 11,855 in 1940, largely with Italian immigrants. Rock of Ages says that between 1870 and 1950 workers came from Italy, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Spain and Norway, and that their skills were passed down through generations.

Hope Cemetery

The Yankee article says Hope Cemetery was founded in 1895, covers 85 acres and holds roughly 10,000 monuments, mostly carved from local granite. It says the graves are grouped and divided by hedges and trees instead of laid on a grid. It names several carvers who are no longer living. Carlo Abate emigrated from Milan in 1899, carved the pair of Virgin Mary figures at the cemetery gates and founded the Barre Evening Drawing School. Angelo Pietro Ambrosini emigrated in 1901, and worked on a Washington, D.C. station contract from 1903 to 1907, including a statue of Ceres that took about a year. The Times Argus says Samuel Novelli carved a Robert Burns statue in 1899 and Elia Corti carved the pedestal panels. We have not checked these credits against a second source.

How it was cut

The Yankee article says carvers worked mainly with hand tools, mallet and chisel, later alongside pneumatic tools, and that artists often made small clay or plaster models before carving full-size pieces. It says training passed through apprenticeships. The Times Argus says that in 1893 pneumatic surfacing machines filled the air with dust.

The cost in lives

The sources agree on the harm. The Times Argus says the dust led to many premature deaths from silicosis, and that in 1920 the average life expectancy of Barre granite workers was 16 years below the national average. The Yankee article says that by the 1920s life expectancy for men in the industry was under 50. It says a tuberculosis hospital opened in 1922 and that dust-collection systems went into 80 plants after 1936, with no new silicosis cases reported by 1938. The Times Argus names the same year, 1936, for the agreement between unions and shed owners to install dust control, and 1921 for a sanatorium. The hospital opening is 1921 in one source and 1922 in the other, and we show both.

The company

The Times Argus says a firm was renamed Rock of Ages Corporation in 1925, that in 1930 ten Barre firms consolidated into it, and that in the 1940s and 1950s it bought quarries and came to control most of the town’s quarry production. Rock of Ages says its own history dates to the 1880s, that it was incorporated as Rock of Ages in 1925 and that it changed owners several times from 1984 to 2016. The sources agree on 1925.

What kind of sources these are

The Times Argus is a newspaper timeline. The Yankee article is a magazine feature. The Rock of Ages page is a company blog, and its photo caption dating one quarry photo to the late eighteenth century conflicts with the company’s own 1880s start, so we have used none of its captions. None is a carver’s own account, and we name no living carver.

What the sources do not say

None says how many carvers work in Barre now, how long a headstone takes, or how a buyer can tell hand-carved granite from machine-cut. We have not filled those gaps. We left out wages, contract values and the 1903 violence in the town’s history, which the Times Argus mentions and which this piece does not need.

What it means for a buyer

Our view is that the sources describe a district of makers, not one firm. Ask where a piece of granite was quarried, who carved it and whether the carving is by hand or by machine. And treat a claim about “Barre granite” as a place claim: the sources say the stone is local and the labor came from many countries.

Where sources differ, we show each: the age of the stone and the year of the hospital. We list them in the check file.

Roam first. Shop later.

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