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Barre Granite Festival This Weekend
The Vermont Granite Museum and Stone Arts School will be celebrating its 11th annual Granite Festival on Saturday, September 13, 10am-3pm. There will be demonstrations, hands-on activities, games, live music, a BBQ luncheon, and art exhibits. The event will also showcase the museum's new multipurpose room, stage, and blacksmith shop.
The annual festival is an opportunity for Central Vermont to celebrate its contributions to our national history. The museum's mission is to preserve, honor and showcase Vermont’s granite heritage. The granite industry attracted immigrants to Central Vermont to work in the quarries and the stone manufacturing sheds. The result was a highly productive stone industry, which supported the many trades which helped make it run. Tools and technologies were invented to meet the needs of processing one of nature’s hardest stones. Skilled artists were recruited from Italy and Europe to produce fine sculpture out of the granite. The granite products produced here adorn buildings and parks around the world, comprise some of our national monuments, and memorialize friends, family and loved ones.
At the festival you will have an opportunity to see sculptors working on granite and marble. You can try your own hand at carving, etching and sandblasting to gain insight and better appreciate the skill and effort necessary for creating art out of this medium. There will be a photography exhibit by Leslie Bartlett, whose stunning photos of quarry walls will have you seeing granite “pits” with different eyes. Leslie is also working on a book recording the hands of Barre’s sculptors. The first of his photographs for this project will be showcased at this exhibit.
The Museum was founded in 1995 to preserve the granite heritage and in 2000 given support and funding from the City of Barre as its number one priority because it was seen as a key element to bringing pride and tourist income to the area. In 1997 the Jones Brothers Manufacturing site was chosen. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places because it is an important example of the architecture needed for the granite industry, it was the largest facility of its type in the nation at one point, and it’s one of the last of its kind.
Concurrent with the Granite Festival this year, the museum will be hosting the International Stone Workers Symposium. About 150 stone specialists and masons are expected on site from Sept 11-14. They will be holding workshops prior to the symposium, one of which will build a bocce court. Bocce is a game played with stone or ceramic balls on a dirt court which comes to us primarily from the Italian immigrants so integral to the stone and cultural heritage of this region. An addition to the Granite Festival this year will be a special Mass held at St. Monica’s Catholic Church on Sept 14, 7:45am, to celebrate and bless the stone workers.
Come to this year’s Granite Festival on Sept 13 for a fun and informative day, and to see the progress made in developing the Vermont Granite Museum and Stone Arts School into an educational tourist site. Come marvel at the skill of the stone carvers who will be demonstrating, participate in some Lithic Olympic games, share in the community barbeque, and enjoy the heritage roots music of the “Atlantic Crossing” -who will be proudly sitting the museum's brand new stage.
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