A Peek Inside Inside the Historic John Stevens Shop in Newport
The stone carving shop has taken up residence on Thames Street for more than three centuries.
The John Stevens Shop work area. Photography by Wolf Matthewson
Nick Benson, a third-generation stone carver, in the Newport shop. Photography by Wolf Matthewson
The tap of chisel on stone fills the John Stevens Shop on Thames Street in Newport, as it has for the past 318 years. Nick Benson, the third generation of stone carvers in his family to run the shop, watches as his colleague carefully inscribes a death date into a slate gravestone. “Much of our expertise is in letterform — the history of lettering and making letters that we believe are beautiful,” he says. Founded in 1705 at a property across the street, the shop was run by the Stevens family for five generations before his grandfather, a sculptor who studied at the Art Students League of New York, purchased it with a business partner in 1927. Benson was fifteen when he started apprenticing with his father and realized he had a natural aptitude for carving. Today, the shop accepts commissions large and small, from the tombstones of Newport residents whose ancestors’ names were also carved by hand to the great monuments of Washington, D.C. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Benson and his team used their timeless methods to preserve the famous orator’s words, ensuring an audience for generations to come. Among the inscriptions is a quote from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” “You can read any of those quotes today and they’re topical,” Benson says. “Those memorialized understood that these were lessons that stand the test of time.” A stone of hope, indeed.
