Sculptor restores 125-year-old headstone in Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery

Friday, Nov. 07, 2025

SALT LAKE CITY — A historic gravestone at Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Salt Lake City has been returned to its former glory thanks to the dedication of a local stone sculptor.

The marker is on the grave of Grant Keogh, who died at age 8 years and 5 months some time around the turn of the last century. Cemetery Director John Curtice estimates the stone was placed a couple of years after the cemetery opened in 1897.

The headstone features an intricately carved base topped by a hand-sculpted lamb. Most of the details had been lost to time until Adam Lambert, a Tooele stone sculptor, found it while searching for a client’s family headstone.

“When I saw it, I was just immediately moved by the craftsmanship of it,” Lambert said. “This headstone was very, very special and very particular in the fact that it wasn’t just a regular headstone, it was a sculpture.”

Struck by the marker’s beauty, Lambert spoke with Curtice, and both agreed the Keogh marker deserved restoration. Although the cemetery has a limited budget, Curtice secured $1,000 for the project and Lambert, who typically charges three times that amount, agreed to undertake the extensive restoration out of love for the work.

Lambert took the marker to his shop in September to start the restoration. Almost all the detail on the marker’s surface had been worn off through time and exposure to the elements. Marble, a form of calcium carbonate, reacts to the acids naturally present in rain and sprinkler water, which created tiny pits in the stone over the centuries. Lambert’s first step was to cut away the severely eroded layer. Once the outer surface was removed, he could just discern the original artist’s work, which included stacked paving stones at the base, a scroll draped over the rocks, grape vines with leaves, and the lamb on top. 

However, the specific artistry – the shaping of the stones, the leaves and the lamb’s head – was completely gone. To recreate it, Lambert researched the anatomy of a lamb’s face and then painstakingly fit the new carving into the remaining contours of the stone. 

One of the trickiest fixes involved the lamb’s ears because one ear had been knocked off. To solve the problem, Lambert carved the marble in a way that made the missing piece appear as though the ear was folded forward against the lamb’s head.

The headstone was a single solid piece of marble, but the original artist had carved the base and back to look like separate, stacked stones. To recreate this natural appearance, Lambert researched how different rocks break, then used a hand mallet and chisel to replicate that organic texture in the marble base.

After working on the piece for a month, Lambert returned it to Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery in mid-October.

The restoration was a deeply spiritual experience, he said. 

“I felt very in touch with Grant as I was working on this,” he said. “I truly felt that spiritually he was there, and I kept that in mind the whole project – that I wasn’t doing art just for art’s sake, that I was truly providing a service for someone.

“His parents must’ve really loved him because that headstone is so incredibly unique and would have taken a really, really long time to do,” Lambert added. “One of the things that caught my eye when I went and saw the headstone was that it had a lot of hand-drilled marks, and those are very difficult to do, and very time-consuming.”

Lambert, who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Utah State University, recently completed an apprenticeship and hopes to make restoration his focus. 

“I’m looking for work, and I want restoring headstones to be part of that,” he said.

Curtice was thrilled with the result of the restoration. 

“It turned out beautiful,” he said. “The value of the marker has gone from nothing to priceless.”

Curtice estimates the 17,000-plot cemetery has about 100 markers in similar states of disrepair. 

“These poor markers are just gone; they’re leaving us,” he said. “We need to memorialize these people. [If] we can restore these, we’ll get another hundred years out of them.”

The cemetery has no money to save these markers, however. Its annual holiday wreaths fundraiser, which is under way and offers evergreen wreaths that can be placed on the graves, raises funds to cover everyday maintenance and cannot be stretched to cover restoration projects. Instead, Curtice hopes to start a dedicated restoration fund to save more headstones.

To order a wreath or to donate to the restoration efforts, contact Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery at 801-355-2476.