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In 1902
Sears, Roebuck offered a specialty catalog for
tombstones, enabling customers to select a stone and
specify the inscription without sales pressure from
the mortuary. Sears emphasized high quality for
lower prices than offered by local stone suppliers.
For names, inscription costs were $.06 per
character. Epitaph inscriptions were $.025 per
character. No charge for punctuation or spaces.
Sears' catalog offered a few epitaph examples of
frequently used epitaphs, including the inscription
cost. Adding, "Rest in Peace" cost $.27, "Sleep,
mother, dear. And take thy rest; God called thee
home, He thought it best." $1.52. For raised
letters, 1/8" high and 2" tall, the cost was $.15
per character.
Sears stones were offered in Acme dark veined blue
Vermont marble or white Acme Rutland Italian
marble.*
Sears' granite supplier was located in Vermont so
freight prices were estimated at $.25 to $.75 per
100 pounds east of the Mississippi and $.75 to $1.50
west of the Mississippi.
For a dime, customers could receive a sample of the
marble they were considering.
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180-pound stones roughly 18"
x 18" x 9" thick could be purchased for $5 to $8,
depending on the type of stone, plus lettering.
Three-foot high stones were $15 to $24 and four-foot
stones weighing over 1,000 pounds could be purchased
for $35 to $50.
A large stone for a family plot might cost in the
$70 to $160 range, surrounded by foot stones for
individual family members buried in the plot.
Iroquois Theater manager
Will J. Davis and his family have such a family
plot in Elkhart, IN.
The finished tombstone from Sears arrived four to
six weeks later. Because of the weight, getting the
stone from the train station to the cemetery, and
installation once there, would have been no small
task. The platform beneath heavy stones needs to be
prepared so as to keep the stone from tilting or
toppling. Today a concrete foundation of several
feet is poured; not sure if that was the type of
foundation used in 1903. Perhaps all
tombstone-related services fell into the bailiwick
of the granite cutters. In Chicago in early 1903,
union granite cutters, who earned $3.00 per
eight-hour day, protested those cemeteries who
employed non-union workers at $2.40-$2.85 for a
10-hour day.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Sears' tombstone supplier was probably the Vermont
Marble Company (VMC),
founded in 1880. VMC was one of the world's largest
marble suppliers, in 1894 employing up to 4,000
workers, including many Italian, Irish and Scottish
immigrant craftsmen. It boasted annual distribution
of a million cubic feet of marble from its quarries
in the cities of Rutland, Danby and Proctor.
Vermont had a long relationship with marble, granite
and slate. The facade of the U.S. Supreme Court and
Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC are made of
Vermont marble and granite, as are millions of
gravestones in America's cemeteries. The slate roof
in classrooms and on the roof of the White House
came from the Slate Valley area of Vermont and New
York.
The last VMC milling operation was closed in 1993 by
Pluess-Staufer, who purchased the company in 1976
for its calcium carbonate quarries. (Used to produce
filler materials made of crushed marble, limestone
and chalk filler for use in paper-making, paint and
plastics.) The international conglomerate, known
today as Omya,
still has operations in Vermont, as well as in half
a dozen other U.S. communities.
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