As I head out the door, I said to my husband, “I’m going to the cemetery to do an interview.”
An irresistible joke but the living,
breathing man I met at the River Philip cemetery on Route 321 does not take his
work lightly.
That’s an unintended pun since Keith Elliott
of Wallace restores headstones.
He’s working on eleven in this cemetery thanks
to a grant from the W.B. Wells Heritage Foundation, created in 1985 to preserve
burial grounds and cemeteries throughout Cumberland County.
“It’s great there’s a foundation for this
restoration because it’s labour-intensive,” Keith explains. “I’ve been out here
six or seven times because I can only do so much then I have to leave and come
back. I’m taking a little bit off each time, especially with the white ones; I
let the sun do some of the work.”
He doesn’t use bleach or acid or wire
brushes; he picks off the moss with his fingers and washes the stones with
soapy water and a soft brush.
According to Keith, every cemetery in
Cumberland County needs hours of work done on many of its headstones.
“It’s nice to preserve the history and
hopefully it’s meaningful to people. If people are tracing a family tree, they
want to go and touch that stone. People are very tactile,” he says. “You see
people walk up to a headstone and the first thing they do is put their hand on
it.”
Keith says he doesn’t pay much attention to
the names on the headstones surrounding him, although he does notice when
someone died young.
“Usually it’s the epitaph that catches my
attention but I’m paying more attention to the shapes and the artwork than the
names.”
A creator of headstones himself, the
traditional shapes of older grave markers are in sharp contrast to the natural
slabs with rough edges that Keith uses from the Wallace quarry. As well, the
headstones he’s designing are more personalized. While the most common symbol
in this cemetery is a hand with a finger pointing to heave, Keith has carved such
images as a lobster boat, tractor, eagle, guitar and blueberry vine.
“It’s something symbolic for the person
[who has died]. Quite often, there’s a story there and it’s very personal.”
He has even recreated someone’s handwriting
from a letter.
The same personal touch is seen in the
address stones he designs.
Surprisingly, Keith doesn’t come from a
long line of stone masons or stone carvers; he took up this work after
returning to Wallace in 2004 with his bride-to-be (the couple have two young
sons now). The quarry in Wallace was just starting up again and co-owner Stan
Flynn asked Keith work for him.
“I had no experience but I did wood and
stone carving for fun, and I had worked for a sign company in Halifax,” says
Keith. “Stan showed me the pointers but most of it was self-taught, trial and
error. Same with restoration,” he says, patting a half-cleaned white limestone
headstone. “Research and understanding stone. They should last a long time but
after a while, you can’t do much more. They are a natural product. You can’t
fight nature but it’s nice to bring the headstones back.”
For more information, check out Keith's website: www.keithelliottstone.com
No comments:
Post a Comment