Art covers the walls and statues line the shelves. Giuliano lives in a brown house north of Barre. And Giuliano is the only one left.ĭescended from 20 generations of stone carvers The Italian sculptors have died, or retired, or moved away. The flood of immigrants turned into a trickle, and eventually stopped. The granite industry has modernized and consolidated.

Barre is no longer the bustling industry town it once was. “The guy is dying of silica.”īut all this happened a long time ago. A woman stands next to him, her hand on his chest. Giuliano points to another sculpture - it shows a man slumped back, with his eyes closed. He's surrounded by the tools of his trade, and the broken column under his elbow represents a life cut short. Vermont Public Elia Corti was a stone carver who died in a dispute between anarchists and socialists at the Barre Labor Hall in 1903. And stone dust filled the air: Back then, many of the sculptors developed silicosis, a disease caused by the particles that gathered in their lungs. The railroad chugged into town to take them around the country. Thousands of workers spent their days making monuments. In the early 20th century, Barre was a booming industry town. Now he sits in Hope Cemetery on a block of granite, chin in his hand, with the tools of his trade nearby.

In 1903, a man named Elia Corti was shot there. They built a neighborhood in the north end of town, made wine during Prohibition, established a mutual aid society and built the Socialist Labor Party Hall. The Italian stone workers who came to Barre more than a century ago brought their families, their values, and their way of life. Listen to oral histories of Barre from the Aldrich Public Library. Matter of fact we walk there, we’ll see one of the most famous ones, you know, Elia Corti, the guy who got shot at the Labor Hall.” In Hope Cemetery, I ask Giuliano if there are any old tombstones he’s partial to. This monument marks the grave of Louis Brusa, a master stone carver. Before workplaces were properly ventilated, silicosis plagued Barre's stone carvers. Vermont Public Silicosis is caused by particles of stone dust that become lodged in the lungs. The industry took off, and stonecutters, sculptors, and quarrymen flocked to Barre from all over Europe.Ī hundred years ago, immigrants made up almost half of Barre’s population, and the majority of them were from Italy. Then granite began to be quarried in Barre, and some of those sculptors moved again. These craftsmen were the best in the world.Īnd in the late 1800s, some of them moved to southern Vermont, to work in the burgeoning marble industry in Proctor. The stone carvers came from northern Italy, where there have been marble quarries for thousands of years. Look at the ripples, they look much more realistic than the real thing!”

“They knew what the hell they were doing.

“Those carvers way back then, they really had it,” Giuliano says while pointing at a tombstone. Many of them are buried here, under monuments they created. Hope Cemetery was established here at the turn of the 20th century, when the first Italian stone carvers moved to town. He’s part of a long legacy of Italian stone carvers in Barre, craftsmen whose skill transformed an industry and made the small central Vermont town the “Granite Capital of the World.” He says that long ago, carvers were so skilled that they specialized one man did the flowers, another the lettering. Vermont Public Giuliano points out a detailed carving on a tombstone.

Railroad spike art sculpture