Caleb Wilson: The Monument Maker
This is the third installment of Davidson Local’s series, Voices Beyond the Stones. Caleb Sink invites you to tag along for a journey through the Lexington City Cemetery, uncovering the stories of those who rest there.
More than a century after his death, his work still stands proudly across North Carolina in its quiet beauty and elegance. But here, among the acres of Lexington City Cemetery, he is remembered by only a small, weather-worn stone engraved with his initials. It’s a stone I almost missed, but I’m glad I didn’t, because Henry Jackson Hege has a story worth telling. For decades, he was Lexington’s monument maker.
He was a Midway farmer’s son, orphaned before he reached his teen years, likely forced to learn the marble cutting trade out of necessity. A young boy touched by grief from the loss of his parents would spend decades helping others amid their own grief.
Born of necessity or not, Henry’s work throughout the Lexington City Cemetery alone shows he found a talent in the business. As I explored these acres, I saw it in both his small, humble works and his grander, towering monuments.
He married Miss Jennie Watson in 1880, and the couple built a life on West Second Street. Henry and Jennie would raise three children: a daughter, Nannie, and two sons, Willie and Graham.
Henry quickly set up his marble shop in Lexington and made a name for himself locally. In 1882, when The Dispatch was founded, he was among the early advertisers, promising "SATISFACTION GUARANTEED" on his tombstones and monuments.
In 1893, he built a new shop on East Center Street, at the corner of what is today’s Marble Alley. Even today, the alley bears witness to the impact the business had on Lexington.
Henry’s prosperity would turn to the grief that shaped his childhood during the years surrounding the First World War. Debilitating strokes in 1917 forced the great marble cutter to slow his business down. As his health declined, tragedy struck once more. His son Graham was soon on trial for murder after killing his best friend, Frank Deaderick. He was convicted of manslaughter in the summer of 1918 and sentenced to a year in prison. Henry sold his business a year later, and his health never recovered. He died in July 1920.
His obituary in The Dispatch would provide just a snippet of the kind of man he was.
“During his business career, he had dealings with hundreds of people throughout the county and won and retained the friendship of these and hundreds of others who came in contact with him,” a reporter wrote. “For twenty-five years, he did not miss but one Sunday at Sunday School.”
He was a man of countless friends, but just as time took its toll on his small gravestone, so did it dampen his memory. Yet hundreds of stones across our community are the work of his hands.
The legacy of Lexington’s monument maker endures.
