The Work

This white marble monument in Des Moines’s oldest cemetery had fallen, fractured, and been repaired once before. The fracture ran at a steep angle, which puts the joint in shear — adhesive alone would eventually fail. A basalt pin now carries the load across the break, bonded with knife-grade stone epoxy.

The harder problem was the face of the stone. A century of coal smoke and acid rain had dissolved the marble’s detail until the inscription was nearly gone. Working with Andy Perrin of I Shew You a Mystery, we photographed the surface and ran it through a custom photogrammetry model, pulling letterforms out of stone the eye reads as blank.

The name came back: Sophia Connell Sherman.

The Story

Sophia Connell (1818–1871) married James Sherman in Lancaster, Ohio in 1841, making her sister-in-law to General William Tecumseh Sherman, Senator John Sherman, and Des Moines’s own Hoyt and Lampson Sherman. James was the brother the famous family didn’t talk about. When his struggles sent him back east in 1863, Sophia stayed and held the Des Moines household together.

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