Hand-carved history

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, November 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, carving memory into stone.

For centuries, gravestones were made by hand—one hammer strike after another. Machines have taken over most of that work. But in a corner of South Carolina, one stonecutter is keeping the older craft alive, honoring loved ones the way his family has for generations.

WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has the story.

GILLESPIE: Carving gravestones is a very sobering experience.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: David Gillespie says he’s a student of the brevity of life.

GILLESPIE: All I do is carve stones for people to mark a spot for their memory.

Today, he’s showing WORLD’s Charissa Garcia a five-foot-tall tombstone.

GILLESPIE: As you can see, it throws up a lot of dust.

Using only a mallet and chisel, he carves a scene of rocks jutting out of the ocean.

GILLESPIE: With relief carving, you're really not carving things anatomically correct, you're trying to trick the eye.

Below the relief, Celtic knots and lettering are sketched on the stone, waiting to be carved.

GILLESPIE: See, when I strike the chisel with the mallet, it leaves striations. You can see ‘em right here. And those striations show that some man did this, it wasn't a machine that did this.

Gillespie is a stonecutter from Pumpkintown, South Carolina—a tiny community outside Greenville—nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.

This is a family trade. Gillespie learned about that on a visit to an old graveyard with his mother. She told him about one of their ancestors who was a talented stonecutter.

GILLESPIE: I asked Mama, I said “Where is his gravestone?” And she said, “Nobody carved a stone for him when he died in 1819.” And I thought, why don't I just learn how to carve a stone? I’ll just carve a stone for him!

He tried teaching himself for a couple of months without much success. But after receiving a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission, he flew to Rhode Island for two days of instruction.

GILLESPIE: When I got back home, I took that chisel and turned it a different way and all of a sudden I was carving in an hour what I was taking a day to carve.

Around 70 percent of Gillespie’s business comes from carving new stones. Restoration is the rest. There are many things that can damage stones over time. Erosion from the elements is the primary problem, but it’s not the only concern when it comes to preservation.

GILLESPIE: It's not the size of the stone that keeps it lasting longer, it's the type of material, and you hope and pray that none of these graveyard sextons, as they call them, the lawnmowers, bash into them, the weed eaters trim them…

That makes Gillespie picky when it comes to his commissions. Some stones are more easily damaged than others, so Gillespie prefers to work with slate. It’s a stone that allows for detailed carving while still being durable and weather-resistant.

GILLESPIE: The slate is smooth, you know, it's almost like carving froze butter, is how I describe it.

The craft of stonecutting is usually passed down generationally—from parent to child, from master to apprentice.

GILLESPIE: So because it's an unbroken tradition, it's special, because it's not that you just kind of hacked it out and figured it out; it was passed down from person to person. And so that's why I do hope someday I can pass it down to somebody down here to keep the tradition alive.

But Gillespie and his wife, Renee, don’t have any children, and he’s hesitant to share the tricks of the trade with others. With only around two dozen stonecutters in the U.S. and none who do it full time in the South, Gillespie is worried he could create his own competition.

GILLESPIE: I probably need to get rid of that mentality, but that's just kind of where I'm at right now. Because it's such a niche thing, it actually is to my advantage that it's niche.

But Gillespie says he is considering passing the craft to a young man in his church. And since he hopes to be carving for a few more decades, that may be the amount of time he needs to properly train his replacement.

GILLESPIE: If I showed somebody every trick that I knew, it took me about 10 or 15 years to kind of get, I don't want to say master it, because you never master anything, but it's like to get comfortable enough to say ‘I might could actually make a living doing that.’

Stone carving is time-consuming and labor-intensive, with faster or cheaper modern options readily available. So what motivates Gillespie to keep this ancient craft alive?

GILLESPIE: Down in Abbeyville where my people are from, my ancestor carved a gravestone for one man, his name was John Davidson, he died in 1795. And I cannot find any record of his existence on earth, whether it be property search, papers, census, probate court; on paper, this guy never existed. The only document that's left on this earth that testifies that this man was living on this earth was this gravestone that my ancestor carved for him.

Gillespie says people sometimes ask whether his work is depressing. He says it’s not. And his wife Renee explains it’s a way of marking history, and honoring the lives of other people.

RENEE: We obviously are all gonna die, and so I think it's a great privilege to be able to share the talents that God's given us to come up with a monument that would mark someone's grave.

So, Gillespie pays special care to keep each individual in mind as he carves.

GILLESPIE: I'll put up a picture beside of me in the shop of the person itself that'll show this is somebody's father, this is somebody's mother, or granddaughter, grandmother. This isn't just a job, this represents a soul.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin with reporting from Charissa Garcia.

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