David Hill places a rubber template over the top of the granite slab. Wearing a protective suit, he lifts a nozzle, and a jet of sand carves the design and lettering into its face, a future monument headstone.

He was 3 years old when his father, Clois, started the family business in 1957 in south Augusta. Cutting letters and designs into granite has been a part of his life since he was a teenager.

At 51, Southside Monument is the oldest monument sales company in Augusta, David said. Competition comes mainly from catalog salesmen who drive down from Elberton, the source of Georgia granite.

An oops with the sand blaster can be a heavy mistake. Each monument can weigh hundreds or thousands of pounds.

"Sometimes, you can saw off the face, polish it and re-letter it," he said. "Daddy taught me a long time ago that if you make a mistake, that is eating crow. It don't taste good and don't look good, but you eat it. You throw it away and get another piece."

It can get elaborate, to within a 16th of an inch.

"Back in the day" it was different, he said; the stencils were drawn on paper and then cut by hand with small knives.

One of David's first jobs was to cut letters by hand. He was paid 10 cents per letter.

Today, a computer makes the design, and a machine cuts it on the rubber stencil. It only takes a dentist's hook to remove the cutout.

That's Clois' favorite part of the business now that he's 88 years old.

"He really can't do anything physical any more. Every once in a while, he (will) come down and say, 'Let me have that; I'll go back and lay it out,' but we have to hold him off," David explained.

Other than a few part-time workers as a set-up crew -- and a salesman -- the business has been family-operated for five decades.

When times are slow, the company sells one monument a week. Five or six, and it is a busy time.

"It is affected by the economy. This feeds off other jobs, when they are doing good and people are spending money, then we are doing good, too," David said.

Granite and marble monuments are seasonal work; spring and summer are the busiest. Mother's Day and Christmas tend to draw more customers as families get together and decide to do something special for a deceased loved one.

"It is the type of business that has been in the family so long that you don't want to give it up. It is in your blood," said David's wife, Patrice.

Southside does more than grave markers, however. It has created stone signs, cornerstones for churches and civic memorials.

Headstones are the majority of work coming in the door at Peach Orchard Road.

The biggest one took five months to arrange. The 8-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide monument weighed 20,000 pounds and took a crane to place.

The service area isn't just local. The Hill family has driven to Birmingham, Ala., and Asheville, N.C.

"Somehow or another, people find out about us," David said. "We have shipped monuments as far as Germany and Czechoslovakia."

David has done a few headstones for family members; namely, his mother and eldest son.

Dealing with customers in grief isn't as hard as it would seem.

"We try to be friendly and courteous to them. They are in a predicament where they've lost someone," Patrice said.

It isn't an easy business. No one can predict death, and none of the Hill family can predict business from day to day.

Success is in being persistent, she said.

"There are months when you think we're going to make it, do really good," she said. "And then the next month, you drop off to nothing."

The business is like many others.

"We always managed to make a living," Patrice said. "Money-wise, it is just like an average person making a living."

David has thought of getting another job over the years to get benefits. Self-employed health insurance is costly.

"At 54 years old, what would he do?" his wife said. "This is all he knows."

Cutting three dimensions is a different process from following a stencil.

"Like for the flowers and things, you have to sandblast the depth first," David said. "You take another nozzle and shape the flowers."

A program directs a band saw that cuts the granite into shapes, such as the popular teddy bear monument.

"In this business, you're really limited to your imagination," David said.

First generation

Clois got into the business of selling headstones because he was born in Elbert County, the home of Georgia granite. He was working at Lily Cup, now known as Solo Cup, when some people needed a monument and wanted his help in finding people in his hometown to provide one.

"A man come down and was setting it and was talking to him, you know you can make some money selling these monuments, so Daddy started doing it on the side," David said.

The stones were displayed on a piece of rental property on Peach Orchard Road, next to the business's current site. People who stopped by would give their information to the florist there, and she would send it to Clois.

"He gradually got his foot in the door," David said. "He started off with a pickup truck and wheelbarrow."

"Started rock bottom," Clois added.

Clois drove to Elberton to pick up the stones, which were made to order, including the lettering, and deliver them to the cemetery. The business grew slowly, and Clois was able to buy a bigger truck and more elaborate erecting equipment.

He learned the hard way how to put up a heavy monument: Set the skid boards and use some leverage.

"It was a major operation to set up a monument in his day," David said. "He encouraged me to look for better ways to do things."

Such as cranes that reach halfway across a cemetery.

"We've done well over the years because he's good with people, he sympathizes with people," David said of his father. "He didn't try to make a killing on every stone. He tried to help them. His main drive was to service people, give them something they wanted."

Clois came to Augusta looking for work after fighting in Europe in World War II. The family farm near Elberton was being run by siblings, so he sought his fortune elsewhere.

Clois had learned about hard work on the farm through the Great Depression.

"It followed him into this company," said Patrick Hill, the third generation working at the company.

It was Hill Monument in the beginning. Clois changed it to Southside to reflect its location. He wanted to get his name off the business because he was a supervisor at Lily Cup, David said, and didn't want other employees to know he had another job.

"It takes a long time to build a name. I can't understand big companies, building up a name and then dropping it to call it something else," Clois said.

He retired from the cup company in 1978 and dedicated his attention full time to the family business.

Until 14 years ago, the company was run from a small metal shack.

"We just walked around each other," David said.

His mother, Yvonne, was the bookkeeper, but she did that at home.

David was one of three children and the only one to follow in his father's footsteps.

"He showed me the technical trade, and I learned a little bit more in Elberton," he said. "The biggest thing he showed me was how to handle myself and treat other people. The ingredient is to take care of people and they will take care of you."

Second generation

David started working for his father in the mid 1960s. He said it was his father's idea to give him something to do, to keep him out of trouble. At age 15, he started cutting letters out of stencils and then blasting them into the granite.

"I not only had to do the work, I had to keep a log of whatever I did because he paid me on what the logs were," David recalled. "I made pretty good money for a kid. I was 15 years old. I was making $50 to $75 a week, eventually got up to $150 a week."

David said he went back over his notebooks, averaging out his months, and determined that he has cut more than 2 million letters in his career.

He followed in his father's footsteps in other ways, too. He also had a job in manufacturing.

He went to Augusta Technical College and trained as an auto mechanic.

"I searched the automotive industry for a while and couldn't get the jobs that I wanted," he said.

He ended up in a machine shop for Hydreco, a company htat is no longer in Augusta.

"They went through an economic slump and started laying off people. I was working two weeks on, two weeks off. Everyone else was crying ... I came straight here in the afternoons and worked for my daddy," David said.

He said he was making more money on the side at the family business than with his regular job. When his father retired from his stint in manufacturing in 1978, David went full time with the monument company.

A year earlier, he had married Patrice, whom he met at Young Life, a Christian organization for young adults to get acquainted. His best friend set them up.

She joined the business in 1992 after their fourth child was born.

"They really didn't have anyone down here to do any secretary work. Of course, we were in that little metal building then," Patrice said.

That changed in the late 1990s when they determined they needed a regular office and retired the metal shack.

"Mr. Hill always said all you needed was a pencil and paper," she said.

Now they needed computers and work stations.

"The bigger you get, the more resources you've got to have," David said. "The public demands it, too. You have to be able to show them what the product looks like ahead of time.

"You've got to have creative ideas for them."

Third generation

For a few years, Patrice was unable to go to work at Southside Monument. In 1997, their oldest son, Robert, committed suicide just shy of his 17th birthday.

"He suddenly developed schizophrenia," she explained. "He was normal all his life."

The medications seemed to work for only a little while and then Robert's schizophrenic symptoms would return, she said. It is a mystery because no one else in the family tree had schizophrenia.

"When he died, it just hit so hard. It was a daily chore to get through it. So I didn't work here for five years. This business ... I couldn't take selling monuments after that," she explained.

If you were to guess that Patrick left the family business to work in industry and then came back to the monument company like his father and grandfather, you'd guess correctly.

As a kid, Patrick worked with his family as a cleaner. As a teenager, he set up monuments and lettered stones.

His dream, though, was to become a dentist. He got a degree in chemistry from Georgia Southern University but was unable to test into dentistry school.

With his chemistry degree, he went to work for EMD Chemicals in Savannah, which made pigments. He was a lab technician.

"He couldn't give up that dream of dentistry, so he went to Greensboro to try to get a master's in chemistry, thinking that would help him get into dentistry. And that didn't work, so he came home," Patrice said.

Patrick said work was piling up on his father, so he rejoined the family company.

"I missed the business, and you go back to what you know," Patrick said. "I enjoy it, and I look forward to the future."

Is Patrick going to take over one day?

"I really don't know," Patrice said. "He's kind of in limbo."

She and David's daughters, Rachel and Casey, aren't employees. Casey is getting married next Father's Day.

Clois still works there, though his role now is to "check in on us and make sure we're behaving ourselves," David said.

Ask him about his own retirement, and David will laugh.

"If I can do as well as my daddy and last like he has lasted, I will feel good," he said. "Hard work won't kill you, but you get mighty close."

Patrice said she believes her husband would restore vintage cars the rest of his life if had the choice.

He put his training as an auto mechanic to use by restoring cars that he drove in his youth.

One of them, a 1972 Ford Maverick, was featured in a magazine last May.

He also has a 1965 Ford Mustang that he fully restored.

"That is just a personal interest I have," he said. "I don't do it to make any money with it."

He does make some money growing hay at his home in Hephzibah.

"I ended up picking up some horse customers," David Hill said. "I do that in the summer months.

"It is kind of like how Daddy got started in this business. People started asking me about the hay and I started selling some."

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.