Button Couldn’t Escape

His Family’s Occupation

By Sandy Vondrasek

For a guy who has 116 years of stonecutters in the family and who started whittling wood when he was six years old, it took Clint Button a long time to find his future in granite.

The son of Route 110 dairy farmers Wendell and Ginny Button, Button left Vermont in 1980, when his parents bought a dairy farm in South Carolina.

After high school and college, Button "cheffed" for a number of years, working up to the executive chef level, and at some of the top restaurants in the South.

Chef Button was known for his elaborate ice carvings, a skill that served him well in 2000, when he started work, under a federal jobs training program, at the Gary Sassi granite shed in Barre.

Button had moved back to Vermont to care for his ailing grandparents.

"Ice provided the platform for my success in granite," he says. It turns out that granite, though much harder than ice, demands the same kind of "immediacy" and precision as brittle ice.

But working in granite, Button stresses, "is very brutal, very difficult work."

Button says his success in granite was also buoyed by family history and connections. Astoundingly, he found "the man cutting stone beside me turned out to be my cousin."

That cousin, master carver Andy Hebert, who was once apprenticed to Phil Paini of Bethel, took it upon himself to train Button.

"I became Andy’s legacy," Button said.

Three years later, however, Button was laid off. He and his wife Beth, pregnant with their first child, decided to move back to South Carolina.

The chances of getting work as a granite carver wouldn’t be much better there, but it is easier to be poor in the South, Button said.

In South Carolina, he found more family connections in the industry. His uncle, Dario Rossi, a traditional—and the only—granite carver in the South for 35 years, recently retired.

"So I was a shoo-in, but that doesn’t mean you can make any money," said Button, adding that he "cuts fish" at a local fish market, when stone commissions are scarce.

Button built his own granite studio, which is named after the couple’s four-year-old daughter. See carolinasculpturestudio.com., on line.

Button’s well-equipped shed is designed to accommodate up to eight carvers, and Button has had a few students. He teaches stone carving: "I don’t own a sandblaster."

If his life and family history conspired to put a chisel in Clint Button’s hands, it also seems that his personal background makes him uniquely suited to lead the granite industry into the King Is Ours protest.

"It’s a huge opportunity for me to connect the dots," he said. "This is not for me, but for everyone."

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