A Winlock couple, with experience in loss, recently took over a longrunning Kelso headstone business after the previous owners retired.
Emma and Don Turrentine signed the purchase agreement for Lower Columbia Monument in September and started leasing a new showroom on Allen Street that month.
Previously, the shop was located about a block northwest, at 101 Academy St.
With the new location also comes a new name: Columbia Monument.
The couple shadowed former owners Gary and Sharon Plumb since July and considered the business purchase for nearly eight years.
“They agreed to mentor us and teach us all the tricks of the trade,” said Emma Turrentine.
The Plumbs officially retired on Oct. 11, she added, after owning the business since the 1980s.
The Turrentines had lived in Cowlitz County for 15 years. They lived in Castle Rock, then St. Helens before that.
The couple has six boys and two girls, but lost three babies to miscarriages last year, as well as one seven years prior.
The loss, Emma Turrentine said, helps the couple work with the grief-stricken after creating a “new respect for those who have experienced” the same.
“Each loss unveiled a new sensitivity and feeling of connectedness to the grieving,” she said in an email,” and also to those who have gone ahead of us into the next life.”
The couple has a long history of creating, whether through landscaping or growing their own food.
Now, they are using their creativity to add custom images on monuments and memorials. Emma Turrentine said they purchased Gary Plumb’s custom stencil catalog to sandblast onto gravestones, which the couple buys polished and cut.
All the engraving is done at their shop near their Winlock home.
“Stonework (is) the natural next step for us, as artists, manual laborers, and as our grief ministry,” she said.
Columbia Monument
Showroom address: 201 Allen St., Kelso
Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday.
Info: 360-425-0777, columbiamonument.com, office@columbiamonument.com
