On a recent walk in downtown Boulder, I stopped in front of the First United Methodist Church at 14th and Spruce streets where, years ago, I clearly saw a little girl’s face carved into stone. It took me awhile to find her again, as her face is fading away.

According to the late Boulder author Phyllis Smith, who included a photo of the stone carving in her book A Look at Boulder, From Settlement to City (published in 1981), the child was said to have been the recently deceased daughter of a stonemason during the church’s construction in 1891.

While working on the building, the grieving father incorporated the girl’s face among other decorative details.

Newspaper reports from the early 1890s reference Andrew Fraser and Donald Grant (of the firm Fraser & Grant) as the church’s contracted stonemasons. Both men had learned their trades in their native Scotland. Then, in their mid-twenties, they came to America; Grant in 1880 and Fraser in 1882.

The men settled in Atchison, Kansas where Grant married another Scottish immigrant, and Fraser married a woman from Illinois. The two families moved briefly to Denver and then made their homes in Boulder in 1891 —— the year of the Methodist Church’s construction.

Each family had two sons and one daughter. Fraser’s daughter Margaret waws born in 1891, and Grant’s daughter was born two years later.

After their work on the Methodist Church, Fraser & Grant went on to build the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal churches and many other prominent downtown buildings including Boulder’s Carnegie Library and the National State Bank. The men also built several elegant stone residences, including homes of their own, on Mapleton Hill.

Stone for some of the buildings came from the Fraser/Grant quarry on the slope of Mount Sanitas, above Sanitas valley west of Dakota Ridge. Grant died in 1919, in his early sixties, but Fraser continued to work as both a stone and brick mason for many years and was said to have never lost his Scottish brogue. He died in 1947 and is buried in Boulder’s Green Mountain Cemetery.

It seems logical to assume that the little girl’s face carved into the stone on the Methodist Church belonged either to the Fraser or Grant families, yet federal census records in 1900 show that Fraser’s and Grant’s wives each had borne three children, and all six of the children were still living at the time of the next census in 1910.

Sometimes stories passed down through the decades aren’t always accurate. That Fraser and Grant were the stone masons for the Methodist Church is well-documented, but Grant’s daughter lived to be 80 years old, and Fraser’s died in 1993 at the age of 101!

Since Margaret was born the same year as the church’s construction, I’d like to think that it was Fraser who carved the face of his daughter in stone — not because she died, but because she was alive. Either way, the sentiment was the same — the father wanted his little girl to be remembered.

(To see what remains of the carving, look near a lamp, on the north side of the arch at the second door north of the 14th and Spruce streets intersection.)

Silvia Pettem’s “In Retrospect” column appears once a month. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com.