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Stories on Stone: Stone Carver Memorializes the Departed Anywhere, Everywhere

September 15, 2001

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Who says the departed have to be remembered at cemeteries?

For Charlie Hunt, the deceased can be honored anywhere - by a river, on a golf course or at a favorite hunting spot.

A third-generation owner of Nashville, Tenn.-based Hunt Memorials, a memorial and mausoleum retailer, Hunt also creates granite garden sculptures - a hobby that he has turned into another business.

A chance encounter Hunt had with a visitor at one of his garden sculpture shows led to one of Hunt's favorite creations. The visitor had lost a fly-fishing friend to cancer and was seeking an appropriate monument to remember him. The result was a stone boulder monument with a relief of a largemouth bass. It was placed on a riverbank near one of the fly-fisherman's favorite fishing spots.

Hunt originally suggested placing the memorial underwater, smack in the middle of the late fisherman's favorite fishing spot, but the visitor preferred a spot in which the monument could be seen.

"Preferences and perceptions about memorialization are changing," says Hunt. "People are not only seeking new shapes and colors to differentiate their monuments but they are becoming more selective in associating monuments with the personal habits and hobbies of loved ones."

Another granite monument Hunt finished honored a deer hunter. The monument was installed at the late hunter's favorite hunting spot.

Hunt recently completed a stone boulder carved with a relief of a lady golfer for a man whose late wife was an avid player. The monument was installed at a golf course.

"I'm always telling people that what I do goes beyond stereotypical images of gray markers, drab designs and old cemeteries," says Hunt. "When I'm at a party and tell people I work in monuments, people say, 'Oh, gravestones? How depressing.' But if I say I'm a stone carver, a craftsman, an artist in a studio and a storyteller of memories, they want to hear more. That's what I do."

Hunt considers his business a specialized craft shop in which people's desires to remember loved ones are translated on stone after listening to their needs in meetings that can last for hours, weeks and even months.

"It's all about carving memories that last forever in our sense of time," says Hunt. "I just tell the stories on stone that can be remembered anywhere."

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For more information about memorialization trends and to interview Hunt, e-mail Linda Mathiasen at LMathiasen@coldspringgranite.com.