How an Italian immigrant started making northern Ontario curling stones in the 1960s

For a short time in the 1960s a small northern Ontario shop created curling stones made of black granite.

Peter Ellero, a master stone carver from Italy, emigrated to Canada with his family in 1962, and settled in Sudbury, Ont.

For a few years, he worked for established stone businesses in the region, like Terrazzo Inc., and then he was offered a business opportunity to design and carve curling stones.

His son, Fred Ellero, who has since taken over the family business, called Ellero Monuments, said his father didn't know anything about curling.

"But, you know, he did know about stone working," he said.

The family moved to River Valley, northeast of Greater Sudbury, where there was a quarry that supplied the granite for the curling stones. Ellero said they lived there for five years, before returning to Sudbury.

He said his father built all the machinery necessary to create the stones.

"He built the drills to core them, the saw to cut them in sheets and two different kinds of lathes to spin them and shape them and then polish them," Ellero said.

While the stones met all the requirements a curler would need, there was one problem: the granite had a hairline crack that was invisible to the eye until the rock was polished.

"When the stone is polished, you've done the job already," Ellero said. 

"So they found out the hard way when a curler threw the stone down the ice and it would hit another stone and some of them would do what they're supposed to do, impact and separate, and some of them would split in half."

Ellero said the quarry that supplied the granite could only afford to mine the surface material, which would have been exposed to the elements, which can create small cracks.

Despite that setback, Peter Ellero went on to open Ellero monuments. Fred took over the family business, and his son plans to take over after him.

"We're about six generations in the stone business," Fred Ellero said.

Curling stone research

Today, the curling stones used for international competitions like the Olympics and world championships, come from only two places: Ailsa Craig, a rocky isle off the western coast of Scotland, or the Trefor quarry in North Wales.

Derek Leung, a PhD student in mineral deposits and Precambrian geology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, has studied what, if anything, makes those two quarries distinctive.

And small cracks notwithstanding, he discovered there was nothing unique about the granite from both quarries.

"Ultimately, what we're interested in for curling stones is their physical properties so that's the wear of the bottom to the running surface as well as the integrity, or the impact resistance of the striking band," Leung said.

"And so if we find a rock that has similar mineralogical and textural properties, it may perhaps have the same physical properties which are desirable for throwing stones."