Masonry Saw Blade

Boyhood friends formed a bond, a business as expert masons

Who can imagine when they're 6 years old what they'll be doing when they're 60?

Ron Carter and Malcomb Witt first heard each other's names on a late-summer morning in 1957, on the first day of first grade at Center Hill School in Bourbon County. In 1957, the year 2011 was the stuff of science fiction. It conjured images of flying cars, moon colonies and houses shaped like obelisks or saucers. What Ron and Malcomb could never have imagined is what would turn out to be fact in 2011: They would own a Bourbon County masonry company together called Carter and Witt; it would be known for its workmanship on traditional and historical homes; and their decades-long friendship would be at the heart of it all.

Carter, the son of sharecroppers, and Witt, whose parents had a dairy farm, hit it off from the start. Both boys were quick in math; in arithmetic contests, "We were always the last two standing," Carter says. Later, both took up the saxophone. Both played on the basketball team.

Looking back, those activities make perfect sense because laying brick is as much about rhythm as a Gershwin tune and, like basketball, it takes good hand-eye coordination. And the planning in masonry requires what all of us were taught but few ever use: algebra, the Pythagorean theorem, how to figure volume, etc.

"I treat brickwork like pure mathematics. Every brick has a specified position," Carter says. "I like to know where my last brick is going to be laid before I lay the first one."

He's standing outside Old Vine Square, a three-story Williamsburg-inspired office building near downtown Lexington that is one of the more public examples of their work. Built with 90,000 bricks salvaged from an old distillery warehouse, it features Roman arches at ground level, wedge-shaped jack arches over the windows, and a style of bricklaying called English bond, which uses alternating courses of headers and stretchers. Carter's eyes scan it now, 22 years after it was finished, searching for imperfections.

"For me, laying brick well is very much like playing music," Carter says. "You are taken over by the process, and it just flows. To do it well, it requires your total concentration, but for an accomplished mason, it is not necessarily an intellectual process. That process occurred when you were learning the fundamentals. Now you are operating by body memory — the motions you have repeated thousands of times. You have rhythm, flow, momentum.

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