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Barre makes a good living off of death: The boom years may be over, but more granite gravestones are still produced here than almost anywhere else in the United States. Gross sales of world-famous Barre Gray granite topped 11 million dollars last year. And Barre Gray is about the best there is. Fine-grained and impervious to weathering, it can be pulled from the earth here in huge flawless blocks. Street curbs and yuppie kitchen countertops aren't sufficiently noble uses for the stone; this stuff is meant to last the centuries. The steps of the east wing of the U.S. Capitol are made from Barre Gray. So are the grave markers of Stephen Foster, Harry Truman, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Col. Harland Sanders. (Does the man who invented Kentucky Fried Chicken deserve anything less?)

Hope Cemetery, where sculptor Giuliano Cecchinelli shows off the flower carvings, is one of three graveyards managed by the city. Only memorials made of Barre Gray are permitted there. Other than that, the options for eternal remembrance are wide open. "We allow bigger monuments than most other cemeteries," says Dwight Coffrin, whose title, Director of Cemeteries and Parks, seems to list his responsibilities in order of importance to the city. Hope also allows more unusual ones. Along with the usual crosses and cherubs, markers for the 85-acre (34-hectare) park's 10,500 graves include an actual-size armchair, an oversize soccer ball, an airplane, a race car, and a massive cube balanced mysteriously on its corner. A number of the stones mark empty graves. The pre-need purchase is common: Many people erect tombstones decades before they die. "That way, you know how you'll be remembered," explains Coffrin. "People want to enjoy their memorials while they're still alive." But those paying respects to their own gravesites are far outnumbered come autumn. "This cemetery averages 35,000 visitors during the six weeks of the fall foliage season each year, and those are just the ones on tourist buses," Coffrin says. "We don't even keep count for the rest of the year."

The rest of the year can be a problem in Barre. Despite the city's Green Mountain location, summer temperatures and humidity sometimes soar here, and the winters are numbingly cold. Just ask Pete O'Grady. In September of last year the 33-year city employee resigned as Barre's superintendent of streets to start a new life in Phoenix. The desert held an obvious appeal: O'Grady's job had involved clearing his hometown's roads of its annual average of seven feet of snow. But after only ten weeks away, O'Grady returned to Vermont in November. He'd been miserable in Phoenix. He'd hated the crowds and crime, the traffic and bureaucracy. "Everything's so complicated there," he remembers. "You have to give them your social security number and sign your life away just to get your utilities hooked up. In Barre, whatever you need, you make one call and it's done." O'Grady's former job had not been filled yet, so the city rehired him. The superintendent of streets of Barre, Vermont, picked up right where he'd left off—in time for the season's first blizzard.  "I didn't mind," says the guy who grew up on Granite Street. "It was so good to be home."

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