A pastoral scene of a mountain, forest and stream with a wandering buck and a soaring eagle on shaped polished granite is an example of an etched monument. Introduced 25 years ago, etched monuments have grown to half of the business at Walters Monuments.

Traditional meets modern as a granite monument covered with a computer designed rubber stencil is engraved by blasting with aluminum oxide abrasive.

Etched monuments can be colorized using lithographic dyes. Craig Walters uses a fine brush to apply the dye to the etching. The dye reacts with and is absorbed by the stone forming a bond that will last over fifty years.

Craig Walters makes a full-scale hand drawing for the design of an etched monument. After approval, the design is transferred to the granite with a hand held diamond tipped high-speed cutting tool.

Colorful pastoral scenes etched in stone

Summit Hill

Each time the phone rings, Craig Walters hopes it isn’t someone that he knows personally. But when you own one of the few remaining monument businesses in the area, sooner or later, you will be designing a memorial for a friend.

Walters is currently on one of those painful journeys. Six months ago, a friend was diagnosed with cancer and given eight months to live. Walters was asked to design a very special monument, a headstone made from a millstone from an old gristmill.

“This business is hard enough because of the nature of the business,” said Walters. “I try not to let myself get too personally involved but when you know somebody, it makes it that much harder.”

You may have seen Walters this summer. He packed his truck with his designer monuments and exhibited them at many of the region’s fairs. “There aren’t many monument companies left in the area,” said Walters. “It’s sort of a dying art—if you will. I’d like people to get people familiar with our products.”

Walters exhibits two types of monuments – the traditional deeply engraved style formed by sandblasting, and a newer technique called etching. Etching, a shallow cutting of the stone with rich detail that can reproduce photographs and be colorized, became available about 25 years ago. It has grown to fifty per cent of his business.

Making of A Stone Cutter

In 1976, Craig Walters, a Tamaqua native, was hired by the Summit Hill Marble and Granite Company to work as an office worker and bookkeeper. The company was started in 1920 by Polish immigrants Bronne Bruzgo and his wife, Mary.

When Walters started, the shop had 15 stone workers—most were ready to retire. As each retired, he was asked to step in and learn their job.

After Mr. Bruzgo health deteriorated, Mrs. Bruzgo took over the business. Unfamiliar with the operation of the business, she tried to keep it running but it began to lose money. Walters made a series of offers and, in 1977, he purchased the business and changed the name to Walters Monument Company.

The purchase included the 1920s building, the stock of granite and the equipment. Much of the equipment was both worn and old technology. The monument business had moved into the computer age.

High Tech Monuments

Technology has changed the production of granite monuments. Through the application of computers, lasers and diamond tools, today’s monument manufacturer has to have sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to use it.

The traditional monument has half-inch deep letters cut into a granite block. Today, the monument is designed on a computer. A print of the design is submitted to the customer for approval. This is important because errors or misspellings cannot be corrected once the stone is cut.

Once approved, the design is outputted to a special plotter that uses a cutter head to score a sheet of 40-mil rubber. The completed rubber mat looks like an oversized mimeograph machine stencil. The cutout material is removed leaving a thin membrane on the bottom surface to hold the lettering on the rubber mat in place.

The rubber mat is glued to the face of the granite and the stone is rolled into a sandblasting booth. In the old days, sand was used to engrave designs into the granite. Today, aluminum oxide is used. Abrasive is sprayed over the rubber matted stone over several passes of an automated nozzle. The monument is removed and washed—ready to be shipped.

The newer technology is etching. After a customer specifies the requirements of a monument, Walters produces a full-size hand-drawn design for the customer’s approval.

Once approved, Walters lays the design over the stone and uses a high-speed diamond tipped rotary tool to etch the lines into the stone. If photographs are specified, the stone is sent to a specialty shop that etches the scanned photograph into the stone using a laser plotter.

Either type of etching can be colorized using lithographic dyes that are hand painted and bond to the exposed stone. The color is expected to last over fifty years.

Christmas Rush

Besides headstones, Walters makes memorials for driveways, town entrances and tourist destinations. You can see one of his monuments in front of the #9 Miners Museum.

If you are ever in the need of a monument, Walters advises you to avoid the busy periods. “Americans are great procrastinators,” he noted. After the funeral of a loved one, some people put off ordering a headstone.

“And there is a Memorial Day rush,” he continued. “People go to the cemetery for Memorial Day and I’ll get calls from people who want to have the headstones ready for this family get together.”

There is a similar rush for Mother’s Day and Christmas. With only two stonecutters to assist him, Walters becomes overwhelmed with pre-Memorial Day requests for up to 300 headstones. He meets these demands by working days that run 18 or 20 hours.

“I like what I’m doing,” admits Walters. “I help people and get to meet a variety of people. There’s variety of things to do. I never know from day to day what I am going to do when I come to work.”