The Brush, the Mallet, the Chisel, the Letter

The John Stevens Shop ~ Established 1705

by Richard Pelletier

“John Stevens, Stone Cutter Takes this method to inform the public and his former employers in particular THAT he carries on the stone-cutters business at his shop the North end of Thames Street where any persons may be supplied with tombstones, gravestones, hearths, and printers press stones, and where every kind of work in stone is performed in the neatest and most elegant manner.”

Newport Mercury, October 27, 1781

29 Thames Street, Newport Rhode Island

LATE AFTERNOON. A warm September day. Autumn light drifts down through the windows and skylights of Nicholas Benson’s stone carving shop on Thames Street in Newport, Rhode Island. High on the wall, a likeness of Nick’s grandfather. He is John Howard Benson, whose creative fires stoke this place like the light of an endless sun. Nick Benson is at his workbench. Overhead on a wooden shelf, a row of mallets and wood planes, smoothed and worn, register the yawn of time, gathering dust.

The space is intimate, glorious. Thick, exposed, load-bearing beams; mallets and chisels and wood planes and ropes. Small blocks of stone carved with the letter R. (“I’m a big fan of the letter R,” says Nick. “It incorporates all the strokes in the alphabet and it is a gorgeous form, but the Trajan School B is enough to stop my heart.”) Shelves and drawers and walls are lovingly filled with old tools, drawings and sketches, letters and photographs, books and letterforms. There are thick slabs of granite, marble and slate. It’s the studio of an artist of the Old World, sumptuous and magical, a visual feast. All that light. A sense of order.

In the glare of a simple desk lamp, Paul Russo carves a honed granite headstone that leans on a large wooden easel. A twenty-plus-years stone-carver, he’s Nick’s main man. Russo has just finished a line drawing of a sailboat and now comes the world’s shortest biography — name, date of arrival, date of departure. The going is slow; it will take him two weeks to finish. It’s slow because granite is the hardest stone there is. And because this is how they do it here. (Cost of the headstone Paul is working on: $5,000.00. A commercial headstone shop would do the same in two hours for 1800.00.) To watch for a minute is to know two things. A hand-carved headstone is a sensitive, lasting and loving tribute. And it is fierce, hard, painstaking work. “My hands are fine,” Russo says, “it’s my elbows. I have tendinitis.”

“I have carpal tunnel,” says Nick. “I have bad legs and my knees are killing me.”

The pace in the workshop tends toward a normal eight-hour workday. On large, site-specific projects (for which the Shop is renowned) it’s different. “On those we’re going fast,” says Nick, “putting in nine and 10 hour days. It’s brutal.”

As chisel meets granite, a rapid fire, metallic ‘tenk’ sound fills the workshop. Tenk, tenk, tenk, tenk, tenk. Tenk, tenk. Tenk, tenk, tenk. Memorializing the dead in granite has a music and rhythm to it, a syncopation that repeats until it doesn’t. John Cage are you listening?

Between the shop’s first, somewhat crude scratchings from the early days of the 18th century, and the elegant letters that Russo carves today, stand two families. The Stevens family came first. Then came the Bensons, of whom Nicholas Waite Benson is the latest. Which means that the John Stevens Shop has survived six generations of one family and three generations of another.

How did it begin?

The story begins in Oxfordshire, with John Stevens, a stonemason who left home in England for America and landed in Boston in 1698. We know that in Boston, John met a woman named Marcy and married her. Their first-born was a boy, John the second. For reasons unknown, the family traveled south, by sea, to Newport, Rhode Island. There, in 1705, age mid-fifties, amidst the cobblestone streets, he established The John Stevens Shop. Principal activity: masonry. Gravestone inscriptions — of which, it appears, he knew not one single thing — came quickly after.

Did he ever let himself dream? Say it was a cold, late night on Thames Street in his first year in business. Say John Stevens whispered, “Marcy, I’ve got a good feeling. I think the shop can be something.” Exhausted by her long, hard days, Marcy had fallen fast asleep.

Newport and Stevens were made for one another. The town was on a roll, artisans were in demand. His home in the New World was itself born of an odyssey. In 1639, the eight original founders of Newport fled a political kerfuffle in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, ten miles to the north. By the time Stevens got to town, there was plenty of masonry work. It didn’t hurt that the colonies had a high mortality rate. There would be no shortage of customers. Stone carving has been going on more or less uninterrupted on Thames Street ever since. As of this writing, the Shop is now three hundred and ten years old — the oldest company continually doing business in the United States.

Aside from the on again, off again, gravestone work, the early generations of the Stevenses stayed afloat on the strength of their skill as masons. They built fireplaces and chimneys; foundations for houses; they stoned cellars, they did plaster work. They set pots on ships in a town that was thick with them. For a while, shoemaking and repair showed up in the account books — and then disappeared. They kept the lamps lit.

In both the Stevens and Benson eras, the Shop has shown a surprising knack for making relationships. They found customers, friends, kindred spirits, patrons and influential supporters among prominent Newport residents and beyond. In Colonial Newport, some of the Shop’s better known customers come straight out of the history books: Coddington, Slocum, Cranston, Collins, Carr and others. In the Benson era, the names emerged from the upper strata of American (and European) art, business, letters and philanthropy. Paul and Bunny Mellon, J. Carter Brown, Charles Reiskamp, Peter Gomes, Lincoln Kirstein, Maya Lin, Edward Catich, Hermann Zapf.

John Stevens’ first headstones were not much more than a scratching on the surface of the stone. Some survive in the Common Burying Ground in Newport to this day. The very first headstone recorded in the account books[i]was for, “Major William Wanton, £ 1–10–0 to a pair of gravestones for your son.” Only a trained eye could have seen what those rough early efforts foretold. John Stevens it turned out, had an instinctual sense of design and in ten years he mastered the chisel. His progeny were even better. John the second, his brother William, and John the third, (whose advertisement is at top) were each gifted and distinctive artists.

Looking back, the Benson family were great admirers. Several hundred years after the fact, John Howard Benson wrote, “John Stevens II and his brother William, executed particularly fine carved lower-case letters. John Stevens’ grandson, John Stevens III, was especially good at low relief, ornamental carving and portraits. Their technique was instinctual, formed by a strong, innate sense of design.” Nick Benson has said, “The Stevens letters evolved solely through the use of the mallet and chisel. They did not use brushes (as he does today) to lay out the letters they carved. And over fifty-odd years of evolution, this lower-case form was refined to a point of exceptional beauty.” The brush — an ancient Roman technique for laying out letters to be chiseled — came to the Shop much later.

Tomb of the children of Sextus Pompeius Justus, Via Appia Antica, Rome

Nick Benson made his pilgrimage by mountainbike. “I rode out first thing in the morning. The Appia Antica is ridiculously beautiful. It’s all the original 2,000-year-old cobblestones. You’re cruising along and there it is, the Sextus. I had an absolutely religious experience.” During the Pax Romana, he tells me, came a massive boom in new buildings in marble. With it, came inscriptions. “There was a group that got especially good,” he says. “They invented it. And took it to this insane level.”

The Trajan School and the brush technique they used to carve their letters, gained worldwide attention in the 20th century through Father Edward Catich. He was a former Chicago sign writer turned artist, stone-carver, calligrapher, educator and Catholic priest. His work on Trajan’s Column in Rome, finally helped crack the code as to how these magnificent letters were made. (Although Catich gained widespread admiration and acceptance for his work, he has his detractors.) “I am convinced that the carver who did the work on Trajan’s Column,” said Nick, “was not the carver who did the work on the Sextus. But both inscriptions were lettered by the same person. It’s the same group of lettering artists and carvers.” For Catich, the Trajan is the ideal Roman capital letter. For Nick, it’s the Sextus that brings him to tears. “See this ‘B’?” he asks, as he pages through The Eternal Letter: Two Millennia of the Classical Roman Capital, by Paul Shaw. “The emphasis on the stroke coming off the top of the bottom bowl, is much more heavy than the brush would allow for. And there’s a stylistic affectation in the execution of it that’s particular to that group. It’s extremely beautiful. You see it and you go, ‘Oh, my god.’ It has that kind of effect on me.”

Years before Nick Benson ever took up a chisel, Edward Catich introduced the brush Roman technique to a kindred spirit. He was also a trained artist, educator, calligrapher, stone-carver and scholar of the letterform. A man, it turned out, who had already found his way to the brush. His name was John Howard Benson, Nick’s grandfather.

“Letters exist to serve men.” John Howard Benson

The Shop’s late 19th- century and early 20th- century work was good enough, but not much more. The verve and artistic flair of the Stevens’ early work was gone. In the waning years of the Stevens era, Philip Stevens, son of John the third, ran the business until 1866. Then came two of his sons, Lysander and Philip. A brother-in-law, Edwin Burdock stepped in at the end. For a time it operated as P. Stevens and Sons. By the late twenties, it was the kind of shop that a stone-carver might lease to work on a commission. Nick describes it as a kind of men’s club. The doors were open but the Shop was adrift.

Then Mrs. Stanley Hughes of Newport died. She was the wife of Rev. Stanley C. Hughes of Trinity Church. The Reverend wanted a headstone to stand with the beautiful slate stones in Trinity Churchyard. He wanted a headstone that would matter. He wanted sculpture. It was 1926.

John Howard Benson was then 25 years old. He was born and raised in Newport. As a young man he’d gone to New York City to study printmaking and sculpture (among other disciplines) at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. Early on, he’d become deeply interested in gravestones through family visits to the Common Burying Ground in Newport. In The History of the John Stevens Shop, his wife, Esther Fisher Benson, wrote about her husband’s obsessions. “He wrote articles on the relation of our New England headstones to their Greek and Roman prototypes. Epigraphy in its entire history, as well as lettering of every kind was his permanent occupation.” The man had arrived at his moment. The Hughes headstone was his. He took a lease on the Shop for a year and then bought it with the help of a friend, Arthur Graham Carey.

Did John Howard Benson ever let himself dream? Say that on a cold winter’s night, after he’d bought the Shop, the artist leaned over to his wife and whispered, “The Shop. I can do something with it.” If we know anything of Esther Fisher Benson, she was wide-awake and said, “I believe in thee, John.”

In spite of who he was and all he knew, John Howard Benson had no formal training in lettering and had a lot to learn. Where was the best slate and how to get it to Newport? How do you shape and surface the stones? Set them on their foundations? Find skilled help? In terms of both stone carving and running a business, he was self-taught. Nick Benson said that when his grandfather got interested in the business, the shop was like most other monuments shop in America. A little older and on its last legs. Being an artist, he threw all of the monumental trends and techniques of the early 20th — century out the window, and looked to the colonial work (early Stevens included) for inspiration. Because of his talent and connections, the Shop landed some very good commissions. He turned the Shop into a conduit for the arts and crafts movement, of which he was a part.

In his day he established the Shop as an internationally recognized center for stone inscriptions. He wrote two books on letters and calligraphy, The Elements of Lettering[ii]with Arthur Graham Carey and The First Writing Book, a translation of Arrighi’s Operina. After his initial 18thcentury approach to lettering, he moved toward classical Roman capitals.

John Howard Benson attracted all sorts of interesting characters and many of them would become important to the Shop’s extraordinary reach and survival. With his arrival on the scene, came this new and completely astonishing ascent. As in the beginning, so it shall be again. Three generations, father, son, grandson. All three men would become internationally renowned calligraphers and stone-carvers. John Howard, and his son, John Everett, who started cutting stone at age 15 and later went to the Rhode Island School of Design. And John Everett’s son, Nick, who also started cutting stone at 15, and who studied design in Basel, Switzerland. After Nick sent his request for an application to attend, he received a reply that in effect said “We’ve designed a course of study specifically for you. We know your work and your father’s work. We’ve been waiting.”

John Everett, said this about his father. “He managed to create a really interesting life for himself.” Interesting and far too short. John Howard Benson succumbed to a heart condition and died young, at 55 in 1956.

In the period after his death, Esther Fisher Benson kept things going with the help of Arthur Graham Carey, the Shops early investor and family friend. They managed until 1961, when John Everett, then in his early twenties, stepped in and took over the Shop from his mother.

Sacred undertakings

Say “grassy knoll” and “book depository” and you need no other words. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the nation turned its lonely eyes to 29 Thames Street. The commission for the JFK Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery — nearly a sacred undertaking — fell to 25-year-old John Everett Benson. The job came into the Shop through an old connection of his father’s. It would change everything. In the coming years, one high profile commission followed another. Individually and together, John Everett Benson and Nicholas Waite Benson (who won the MacArthur genius grant in 2010) have designed letterforms — and carved inscriptions — for an amazing array of public buildings and memorials. There’s the JFK Memorial, the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (with Maya Lin), the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the WWII Memorial on the Mall in DC, the MLK Memorial in Washington, DC, Four Freedoms Park in New York — the list and the work stretches on. “No one else really does what we do,” said Nick, who took over from his father in 1993. By which he means the marriage of original letterform design and the stone-carving skill that makes epigraph into sculpture.

Nick is a lean, strong man and he was still vibrating with energy deep into a Thursday afternoon. The chisels had gone quiet. As he talked, there was more than a tinge of gratitude and wonder in his voice. As both steward and actor in this story, he relishes every act, scene, and thread. “This is only as good as whoever is in the driver’s seat. My dad and I both talk about this. If you don’t have enough interest and you’re not driven by the potential of all of this, tapping into its history, then really the product is going to be soulless.”

To the question of what his customers were buying from him, he said, “This is interesting. In all of the typographic standard that’s been developed through print and now through the digital age, there’s such a taint of the mechanical. In business, that’s what people want. A clean, no nonsense message.” Then he spoke about the devastating loss of a close personal friend. “He was the other half of me,” he said. As he lettered his friend’s name, date of arrival and his date of departure in preparation for a headstone, that’s when he knew. “When people have lost a loved one, they want to bring all of the humanity, all the memory from the person they lost. And this is the place that resonates most. We’re taking all this time and it’s all done by hand. There’s all this loving care we put into it. Until it happened to me, it was brass tacks of the skill, the legacy stuff, the business. This was very heavy.”

God’s Little Acre, Newport, RI

Just up on Thames Street is Newport’s Common Burying Ground. It’s a block or two east from where the first slave ships arrived in 1696. In a section called God’s Little Acre — also known as the Colonial African Burial Ground — is a headstone with a strikingly lively, artistic style. Cherub’s head, wings, deeply cut leaves. It looks like the work of John Stevens the second, or the third. But the artist was Zingo Stevens, an African slave, who signed his work in memory of his deceased brother. This stone is recognized as one of the first pieces of art signed by an African in the Americas. Zingo Stevens’ recently discovered prayer book is now at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Yale is a client of the John Stevens Shop. Which, as it happens, is exactly where Zingo Stevens learned to cut letters in stone.

Tenk, tenk, tenk. Tenk, tenk. Tenk, tenk, tenk, tenk.