The Hand That Holds the Chisel
In a Connecticut workshop, one of the last slate lettercutters reckons with a craft three centuries old — and what we lose when the chisel falls silent.
The workshop smells of stone dust and linseed oil. It is the same smell that has hung in this low-beamed room since 1783, when Josiah Manning first laid chisel to slate and cut the name of a deceased deacon into the blue-gray face of a stone quarried in Wales. The stone answers to the same hand it always has.
The Grammar of Grief
There is a syntax to the headstone that no manual prescribes but every lettercutter learns. The name comes first, always — centered, in roman capitals, with the surname cut deeper and larger than the given. Below it, the dates, flanked by the briefest epitaph. The stone records what the living could not say aloud.
“You do not cut the letters into the stone. You cut the stone away from the letters. The name was always there.”