09/11/2026
Week 4 — Fri, Sep 11
⛏️ We're headed to Barre, Vermont today — the self-proclaimed "Granite Capital of the World," and honestly, it earns the title.
Vermont's first commercial granite quarry opened near Barre in 1812. By the early 1900s, waves of skilled Italian and Scottish stonecutters had arrived, drawn by steady work in some of the finest granite on earth, and they turned this small town into a hand-carving powerhouse that still supplies most of the monument granite in the country.
The place to really feel that history is Hope Cemetery, just north of town. Opened in 1895, it's become an open-air museum — only Barre granite is allowed inside its gates, and no monument can be duplicated. Wander it and you'll find sculptures that look more like a gallery than a graveyard: full figures, bas-reliefs, even a stonecutter's own race car carved in granite.
The one that stops most visitors cold is Elia Corti's. Corti was a respected Italian stone carver caught in a political dispute at the local Socialist Hall in October 1903 and fatally shot. His brother, William, along with brother-in-law John Comi, carved Corti's memorial from a single block of granite — a life-sized figure of Elia himself, seated with the tools of his trade at his feet, right down to the folds in his clothing.
The trade had a darker cost, too. Many carvers developed silicosis from a lifetime of breathing granite dust — sculptor Louis Brusa, who carved Hope Cemetery's well-known "Sitting Angel," died from it in 1937. Ventilation improvements finally came to the sheds in the mid-1930s, decades after the first carvers arrived.
That lineage hasn't fully disappeared. Giuliano Cecchinelli, believed to be Barre's last carver of Italian heritage still working the stone, still develops pieces in clay and plaster before carving them from blocks the size of washing machines — the same process his predecessors used more than a century ago.
They brought Old World hand-carving traditions with them and adapted them to new pneumatic tools as the trade modernized — heritage skill meeting new technology, generation after generation.
Great stone regions build their reputation over centuries, not seasons. Standing here today, that's not an abstraction — it's carved in granite all around us. More to come this weekend once we're back with photos from the trip.
