Before we retired to Arizona, we owned a gallery outside Boston. For more than 35 years our customers carried beautiful stones out the door of that gallery: fossils, crystals, display specimens, and stones set in finished jewelry. They also carried out tools and supplies for making their kown jewelry. Our gallery, called the Stoneworks, occupied the first floor of a barn built in 1832, on a foundation of granite boulders. A half mile down the road was a former tavern where townspeople plotted against the British in 1776.
Moving to Oro Valley has been a a dramatic shift of scenery. We love it here in Sun City Vistoso. After all those years in business, stones still facinate us, and we occasionally go out rockhounding for material to cut and polish. But now, instead of digging for New England's aquamarines and tourmalines, we find Arizona's malachite, chrysocolla, azurite, and chalcedony. And the Gift Shop in Sun City Vistoso is now the gallery for the jewelry Sandy creates.
So how does "storystone.com" fit into this picture? It started with granite, and jewelry made from the many unusual granites that are such an important part of New England's heritage. Nearly every town in the area had a granite quarry, and jewelry made from any particular quarry let people wear (and give) a symbolic piece of their home town or city. Sandy made elegant necklaces using beads we made from the historic quarries in Lowell, Rockport, and Quincy.
Every one of these pieces of granite had a rich history, and because most people couldn't hear the stories their stones were telling, Curt took on the role of translator. Can you imagine what it was like for a stone to be rejected from the Bunker Hill monument – just because it was too small ? Here's a short version of the story told by that little piece of rejected granite.
After discovering that tale, Curt became spokesman for many other stones that wanted their stories told, too. To reach a larger audience, Curt put the stones' stories on a web site called "storystone.com." This was in addition to the now-retired "wampumworks.com." that gave information about the history of the wampum beads we were making. (But that's yet another story, which now resides with Harry the Gull on "quahog.com," a site of Sandy's brother Stuart.) You get the idea...