Local monument business leaves mark on Utah State

What do the Veteran Memorial, the etchings in the Agricultural Science building, the headstones in the Logan Cemetery and the plaques in Old Main all have in common?

They were each crafted by Brown Monument and Vault Co., a family-owned monument company that has resided in Cache Valley for more than 80 years.

The company is owned by James Henry Brown IV, a fifth-generation stonemason. His great-great-grandfather, James Henry Brown, traveled from England to Cache Valley. Ever since then, the Brown family has undertaken many large projects in the valley, among them helping with the Logan LDS Temple and the Old Rock Church.

Brown said all five of his children learned the craft, but his daughter, Jeanette Bell, is the most committed to continuing the business.

“It’s kind of engrained in our genealogy that we do stonework because it’s gone back for so many generations,” Bell said.

Brown said Cache Valley has a real need for a family-owned monument business.

“Years ago, a lot of monument businesses were passed from fathers to sons to grandsons,” Brown said. “Now, you have monument businesses that are owned by corporations, and they’re just like any other business entity. Sometimes you can lose the quality of some of the monument work that’s done.”

Brown said the work is a combination of art and craft that is catered to customer satisfaction.

“It’s very business oriented,” Brown said. “It’s a lot of craft as well as artistical expression. It’s very rewarding.”

Utah State University asked Brown Monument to complete several projects on campus in the past, the biggest of which is the Veteran Memorial in front of the Spectrum, Bell said.

The memorial, which was erected in 2003, is 6-and-a-half feet tall and 8 feet wide, weighs approximately seven tons and is made of polished African granite. Bell said the monument was so massive they had to build a larger sandblasting room behind their workshop and then hire a crane to lift the stone.

“Whenever you have to hire a crane, you know you’re doing a big job,” Bell said.

Brown said another challenging part of the project was cutting the stone correctly.

“They had to be cut on a very precise angle to accomplish what we did there,” Brown said.

The company’s most recent project near the university was etching the tempered glass walls of Morty’s Café.

The etchings are the names of businesses and individuals who donated to the restaurant’s Kickstarter program in 2014, said Preston Parker, a co-founder of Morty’s and instructor at the university. The company came early in the morning for a few days in January to complete the project.

Parker said he couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

“I think it turned out way better than we had imagined,” he said. “We’re really pleased with the work that was done.”

Parker said the company has a reputation for producing “honest craftsmanship for an honest cost.”

“It’s not about the job. It’s about the customers,” Brown said. “We survive, not because we’re clever, but because we feel like we’re really successful when we’ve taken someone’s ideas and someone’s thoughts and incorporated them into a design and a monument that they can both afford and that meets the family’s need. That is very satisfying.”

— melmo12@gmail.com