Hope Cemetery Barre granite carving
— — the stone the carvers kept for themselves.
Not only on a wall.
“Sixty-five acres on Merchant Street in Barre, founded in 1895 and filled, slowly, by the Italian and Scottish stonecarvers who worked the granite sheds at the bottom of the hill. The monuments are Barre Gray granite, cut and finished by hand. Many of the carvers shaped their own stones in their off hours, which is why the cemetery reads as an open-air sculpture park. A racing car. A soccer ball. A husband and wife reaching across a bed. — from the studio
Hope Cemetery Barre granite carving, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hope Cemetery sits on Merchant Street in Barre, Washington County, Vermont, on a 65-acre parcel laid out in 1895 by the Scottish-born landscape architect Edward P. Adams. Barre is the heart of the Vermont granite industry, and the cemetery is closely tied to the carvers who worked the sheds and quarries on the hill above town. The monuments are almost all Barre Gray granite, an unusually fine, even-grained stone that takes a sharp edge and weathers slowly. The cemetery remains an active municipal burying ground.
Barre Gray granite, quarried at Rock of Ages and the surrounding sheds at Graniteville since the 1880s, is the working material here. The stone is uniform enough to take figurative carving and hard enough to hold the cut for a century with little weathering. The carvers were largely Italian, drawn from Carrara and the Piedmont in the late nineteenth century, alongside Scottish carvers from Aberdeen. Many shaped their own monuments outside paid hours. The result is a working sample book of Barre granite carving from 1900 onward.
Hope Cemetery is open to walkers year-round during daylight hours and is quiet enough that footsteps on the gravel paths carry. The Italian-carver monuments cluster in the older sections to the south, where individual stones tend to draw visitors who walk between them slowly. The cemetery is administered by the City of Barre and posts visitor guidance on its municipal site. The grounds run uphill from the gate, and the older granite reads sharpest in low morning or late afternoon light.