~ story and photos by Bob Gustin
Casey Winningham approaches stone carving with an artist’ s passion and a historian’ s sensibilities. He repairs old headstones and makes new ones in the hand-tooled style of master carvers of the 19 th century.
Previously a blacksmith, he began carving stone as a fulltime vocation about 20 years ago.
But the seeds of that passion were planted when he was only 10 years old, visiting his grandfather in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.
Winningham says his grandfather was the family historian, and he remembers a walk the two took in a family cemetery. The grandfather would point to a stone, with no name or dates on it, and tell Winningham which of his relatives was buried beneath it.
“ I thought, Grandpa, when you’ re gone, who’ s going to know who’ s under that rock?”
Years later, he said he“ gave himself permission” to carve headstones for those family members, even though he was just beginning to learn the craft.
Casey Winningham
Carving Stones
Though he lives in Owen County, Winningham has close connections to Brown County, as it holds some of his favorite spots for tramping through forests and streams, looking for fossils and geodes.
His best-known work in Brown County is a monument to Henry Cross, who created Stone Head in 1851 in Van Buren Township. The original sculpture— part folk art, part road marker and part historical artifact— was destroyed by vandals in 2016. Winningham was commissioned to make the monument.
48 Our Brown County March / April 2023