ABSTRACT
Advertisements for cemetery monuments have been a feature of national mass market magazines for just over a century, but they were the product of a specific modernizing moment: a late realization that gravestones could be advertised as consumer products. Some in the stone trades thought monuments “non-advertisable” to the general public. This was not primarily because they were associated with death, for the nineteenth-century “rural cemetery” movement and Victorian gravestone iconography of hands pointing heavenward with the affirmation “Gone Home” evidence a long-standing sentimentalization of death and a focus on memory and heavenly reunion. It was a marketing problem: monuments were a product acquired once in a lifetime when death precipitated need (Hirschbaum 1927). There was a “progressive” faction within the industry, however, who were convinced of the value of advertisement (Printer’s Ink 1919: p. 41; Amer ican Stone Trade 1916: p. 29). They would not only move gravestone advertising into the national consumer marketplace, but shift its content beyond the ubiquitous Victorian assurances of quality and economy to the commodification of sentiment and memory, in the more comfortable window of pre-need sale. Giddens has argued, however, that central to modernity was the discomfiting distanciation of social relations over time and space and with their disembedding from local face-to-face contexts a growing dependence on impersonal mechanisms and expert systems (Giddens 1990: pp. 21, 26-28). In the monument trade, consumer trust in local craftsmen who learned the business through apprenticeship gave way uneasily to industrial production and national corporate structures. (Elliott 2011: p. 16) Wholesalers in quarry towns were supplying distant stonecutters with finished monuments, lacking only the inscriptions, by the 1870s. Local materials and iconographic forms gave way to white marble, then granite, as transportation improvements, metropolitan taste, and new technologies standardized monument types (Gilmore 1956: p. 16; Elliott 2011: p. 39). Distanciated relationships among producer, retailer, and consumer were mediated by new communications mechanisms: trade publications, business associations, and credit reporting mitigated the uncertainties of business relationships disembedded from local contexts, and fostered trust in professional
expertise and technological innovation. Late additions were the professional advertising agency2 and the mass market consumer magazine. Though the bulk of production was now taking place further up the supply chain, local monument dealers required reassurance that retail sales would remain their preserve when retail advertising, too, went national. This chapter explores the roots of corporate branding and national consumer advertising in the monument trade in the context of growing corporate hegemony and the mediating influence of advertising professionals. An equally important factor in the adoption of national campaigns, however, was the competition for market share that underlay the marble/granite transition. This chapter therefore will compare the marketing strategies adopted by the Vermont marble and granite interests. David Nye postulated that marketing most products relied upon personal connection or recommendation until the 1880s, when monopolies and corporations emerged that were large enough to manage a nation-wide distribution system (Nye 1985: p. 113). In the monument trade, however, national advertising was pioneered not by the industry’s closest thing to a monopoly, the Vermont Marble Company, but by the upstart Barre, Vermont, granite industry. The marble and granite industries were differently structured. The newer granite industry was more fragmented, but its corporate leaders proved more willing to adopt modern marketing innovations to increase their market share at the expense of the older, more consolidated marble trade. Antecedents of Vermont Marble were wholesaling white marble slabs via the expanding rail network by the 1850s. Aggressive entrepreneur Redfield Proctor consolidated a number of quarry firms and finishing plants to create the vertically integrated Vermont Marble Company in 1880. By 1912 VMC controlled 45 percent of Amer ican marble production, but its third president, Frank Partridge, was much less expansionist and aggressive. Lacking a Redfield Proctor, the granite industry remained less integrated. The railway, moreover, came to Barre only in 1875, 25 years after it reached Proctor (Busdraghi 2012: pp. 26-28; Gilmore 1957: 17), and it was only in the 1890s that pneumatic tools streamlined the carving of the harder and more durable granite (Elliott 2011: pp. 37-38). In 1915 some 30 quarry firms supplied rough granite to 160 manufacturers who in turn sold to dealers (Printers’ Ink 1919: pp. 43-44). Only in 1930 would the largest Barre quarry firm enter the wholesale monument trade itself as a vertically integrated corporation (Clarke 1989, 62; Boston Herald 1930: p. 30). Most Barre manufacturers did belong to a local Association, founded in 1886 as a response to unionization (Wishart 1911: p. 9). As production consolidated, advertising agencies convinced the manufacturers to brand their products and advertise direct to consumers. The Manufacturers Association adopted Barre Granite as a trademark in December 1910, aspiring to achieve the kind of national dominance Vermont Marble enjoyed (Monumental News 1911: p. 94), and taking inspiration from a new federal law of 1905 that facilitated the registration and protection of trademarks (Nye 1985: p. 119). One
of the largest Barre producers, Boutwell, Milne & Varnum Co., launched its own national campaign in 1912, and then helped the Association launch a broader Barre Granite campaign in 1916. This campaign foundered on apportioning costs during the difficult years of the Great War. Boutwells then remounted its own campaign to promote its Rock of Ages brand in 1919. The more conservative Vermont Marble Company only began advertising in trade journals in 1912, in response to the Barre initiative, and it was only in 1927 that they made a belated entry into national consumer advertising to defend their declining market share.
