Published: May 31, 2008 09:41 pm      

Goshen man has been shaping stone for decades

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Goshen stonemason Wayne Harshberger said he has been laying brick since he was 3 years old, and started full-time at age 17, as several others in his family had been in the business.

But after carving wood as a hobby in the mid-1980s, his interest turned to carving in stone after a few years. He attended a five-day seminar at Gatlinburg, Tenn., in 1987 and went to work in that form of carving.

“By 1991 I had enough work to go to the Elkhart Main Street Art Fair,” he said, and he has been at the event every year since. He has also been involved in Goshen shows and will be involved in many weekend art fairs this summer, including events at Winona Lake, Indianapolis and South Bend’s Leeper Park this month. He will be involved in 17 or 18 art fairs this summer, he said.

Some of Harshberger’s favorite subjects have been elephants, fish, owls and triangles, but he recently has been carving mobius, which are round shapes with a constant edge. He has won top honors with his mobius carvings in recent years at shows in Three Rivers, Mich., and at Leeper Park. And he has sold some to mathematics instructors, who use them in teaching.

“It’s challenging,” he said of the work, but also noted, “I like to try new things.”

Jefferson native

Harshberger is a Goshen native and was in the Jefferson High School class of 1956, but did not finish. Instead he went to Florida and worked at age 17, returned and joined a local firm. After serving more than two years in the U.S. Army, he returned to Goshen in 1962 and went back to work in masonry.

“On May 18, 1963, I went on my own,” he said, and has been self-employed ever since. He married his wife, Janet, that December. She has taught English at several local schools before going into business in Mishawaka. She runs The Needle Nest at the 100 Center in Mishawaka now.

“She has her art and I have mine,” Harshberger said, and both hold teaching sessions on Wednesday evenings.

They have one son, Wayne II, who is a mechanical engineer with Catepillar at Aurora, Ill. He and his wife have three children, ages 7 to 2.

Harshberger said he “played a little golf” when he was younger and had been a member of Maplecrest. He was a charter member of the Sunrisers Kiwanis Club and served as the club’s fifth president.

Some of Harshberger’s masonry projects have included the original Coachmen Industries office building and the former Keene’s (now Syndicate Fixtures), both in Middlebury, and many residential projects. He recently “recycled” the fieldstone that had been on the bar at Maplecrest Country Club, cleaning it and using it for a fireplace facade and entryway at a new home.

Two years ago Harshberger reconstructed and moved the stone wall and gateposts at the Goshen College north entrance. He explained that the fieldstone posts and wall were first built by Sam Eldridge in 1905 and “I was hired to rebuild it 99 years later. It was 99 years old. I couldn’t say no” to the fieldstone project.

Harshberger explained that he numbered each block and placed them on pallets before moving them to his shop. After College Avenue was widened, Harshberger returned the pallets of stones back to the college and put the puzzle back together.

This spring Harshberger and another stone carver friend worked about two months in their spare time restoring a Civil War monument in a Centreville, Mich., cemetery. The pair carved the barrel of a rifle out of granite and replaced it in the hand of a Union soldier. The gun itself is 14 feet above ground. That work was done one week before their Memorial Day deadline, he said.

In 2006 Harshberger was called upon to restore the Chief Wawasee statue in Syracuse, after it was vandalized. He now is involved in restoring small busts “parlor pieces” for a collector. He has his seventh project waiting on him in the shop, he explained.

“It’s unbelievable. I have had all these opportunities,” Harshberger said of his projects.

“I’m hooked on stone,” Harshberger said, sitting at a workbench in his eastside shop. He said he has a tuckpointing job to complete this summer, but “I’ll take it easy this summer.”

Harshberger predicted that his projects may be smaller in size in the future, but one of his half-finished ones is a limestone memorial for a woman buried in a Bremen cemetery. Her son has hired him to cut an image of Christ on a cross inside a picture-frame of limestone. The memorial will then be pinned to a base stone and placed near her grave.

Harshberger added that he would probably have a hard time turning down an offer to work again with fieldstone.

Harshberger encouraged anyone who may be interested in learning about carving to attend a Wednesday night class, where students may hammer, drill, grind and cut away on stone as therapy.