Granite Cutter Shares His Traditional Craft

The blowtorch crackles to life in Gary Goodwin’s hands, wildly spitting a foot-long spray of orange flame before he tames it.

When the flame has narrowed to a fiery blue 1,000-degree arrow, he hands it to his student. Tim Lewis gingerly applies the torch to a slab of gray granite, splashing flames across its surface.

“Get it right down there, Tim,” Goodwin says. “More of an angle, right where it makes a noise.”

Lewis adjusts the flame, and this time the stone glows and the torch screams. Within seconds the granite’s surface is superheated and moisture trapped within it explodes, sending stone shrapnel flying.

Lesson 1 of granite-cutting school: So-called thermal surfacing is a fast and easy way to roughen smooth stone.

Lewis looks up from the granite. “Do you smell something burning?”

Then he spots the source of smoke--his shirt, which has caught fire from a piece of red-hot rock. He smacks it out.

Lesson 2: Thermal surfacing can be dangerous.

A year ago, Goodwin, 56, decided he didn’t like the trend he saw in the granite industry. Demand was soaring for countertops, steps, memorials and just about anything else one can cut from the speckled stone. But the number of people learning the craft was not growing.

That got Goodwin thinking about something else--how to pass on the skills he has acquired in his 36 years in the field.

“Over the years, I enjoyed my work. As a matter of fact, I was good at what I did,” he said in a recent interview. “So when I got to this position, I decided it was time to start passing this on before I’m too old to do it.”

So after years of shaping stone for others, and six years after opening his own shop, Goodwin opened a school--the Technical Training Center--to teach the art of crafting granite in this northern New Hampshire town of 6,000 people.

“Up in this area it is a dying industry,” he said. “ . . . They’ve been pretty much depending on people my age and the few people coming in. But the people my age are retiring.”

The demand for granite and the skills to hone it are what made Lewis, a 38-year-old mason from Southwest Harbor, Maine, happy to pay Goodwin $125 a day for a three-day crash course.

“It’s getting really popular. Eighty percent of the houses I work in are getting it. No one is getting Formica or wood anymore,” Lewis said.

Marcia Davis, executive director of the Vermont Granite Museum of Barre, said Vermont alone has annual sales of stone totaling more than $100 million.

“If that’s where the money is, that’s where I want to go,” Lewis said. “I’m just glad I had someone to train with.”

Not long ago it would have been easy for Lewis to learn the trade. For more than 150 years, Barre, Vt., 50 miles west of Littleton, was the center of the granite industry.

Barre still is a center for the industry, but it no longer is possible to go there to learn the trade, according to John Castaldo, executive director of the Barre Granite Assn. The last school closed in the early 1990s.

That makes it difficult for companies to replace retiring workers, said Castaldo.

“I didn’t want to see it go,” said Goodwin, who trained at Spaulding 30 years ago. “The more you educate people about a product, the more they want it. That’s what I want to do here.”

So far, five students have learned from Goodwin how to grind and shape granite.

Lynne Ramm, a 43-year-old glass etcher from Lock Haven, Pa., said her weeklong class was worth every minute and every penny.

She went to Goodwin to learn monument etching and stonecutting, figuring she could use both skills in her current job. Branching out is easy once you have the skills, she said. “It was wonderful.”

Goodwin has been around stonecutting since he was a child. His father carved granite, and when Goodwin was as young as 5 he would watch his father work.

But he understands that getting into the industry is tough if you didn’t grow up around it. Even the thought of lifting the stone--which can weigh as much as 205 pounds per cubic foot--turns some people away. “They find the massive stone and huge equipment intimidating,” he said.

So Goodwin gives his students time to adjust.

Once Lewis is confident with thermal surfacing, Goodwin moves on to polishing.

Giving the rough-cut stone of the Granite State the polished look so in demand for countertops and tiles is a time-consuming craft.

Though some of the grunt work, such as polishing large surfaces, has been mechanized, edging, etching and other finishing work still are done by hand.

The process is similar to sanding wood. The craftsman uses a series of increasingly fine diamond grinding pads to scour the surface of the stone until it has a glassy luster.

Lewis spends more than an hour sanding one small edge, working his way through the different grinding pads. He turns to Goodwin when he thinks he has it.

He doesn’t. Pockmarks the size of pinheads remain. Back to the grindstone.

“Usually the first two or three times it’s going to go the way you want it to,” Goodwin said. “Then you’re going to get confident and think you can speed it up. Then you’re going to learn the hard way you can’t.”

The trick, he said, is to learn to identify the stone’s grain. That’s how you get the granite to work with you, not against you.

“When you run your hand [over it], one direction is smoother than the other,” he said. “ . . . If the grain is running in the wrong direction, it will make it extremely difficult to cut.”

After a while, sensing the grain becomes intuitive.

“Sometimes I don’t even look at the stone,” Goodwin said. “I just close my eyes and use my hand.”

As Lewis works, water mixed with stone dust sprays everywhere. The water squirts onto the stone from the center of the grinding pad. And though it may be messy, it’s also saving his life.

For years granite workers were at risk of silicosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling stone dust. The water keeps the dust from becoming airborne.

“If you look at the old pictures from the 19th century, you can see 12 feet and then nothing,” Goodwin said. “It’s just a cloud of dust. It’s amazing any of them lived past 30.”

Goodwin isn’t the only one aware of the need to train new granite cutters, or the only one fearing the art someday could die out in the region.

Castaldo said his group is working with the state of Vermont to reopen the Spaulding school, as well as with the Vermont Granite Museum of Barre to start a new one.

When he finishes his training, Lewis will return to his masonry business in Maine. He hopes he eventually will be good enough to offer granite crafting services.

“So how long is it going to take me to learn countertops?”

“After this session it’s going to be quite a bit of trial and error,” Goodwin said. “You’ll have a little bit of knowledge.”

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Barre Granite Assn.: https://www.barregranite.org/