Stone & Family: The Life and Work of Daniel Roerig

Quick facts

A life shaped by stone and small-town rhythms

Daniel Roerig’s life reads like a ledger of local commitments: dates, names, the steady work of a craft. Born July 20, 1961, in a town that keeps its own hours, he became part of a multi-generational business that measures time in memorials. Stone is literal in his story — carved, set, and read by generations — but it is also a metaphor for the steadiness he brought to family and trade. He owned and worked in Fackler Monument Company, the local maker of headstones and markers, which the family took over in the 1990s and continued to run after his death.

The physical labor of monument work — lifting slabs, polishing faces, incising names — is a kind of slow storytelling. For a small-town craftsman, the workshop is a stage where private histories are turned into public markers. Daniel’s role was at once managerial and hands-on. He was the kind of proprietor who could stand at a bench and also keep the books; he could teach a teenager how to set a base and how to answer a customer’s questions with steadiness.

Family ties: marriage, children, and multigenerational business

On August 18, 1984, Daniel married Andrea Renee Wages. Together they bought Fackler Monument Company around 1995 and ran it as partners — in marriage and in work. They raised two children in Montpelier: Zachary (born February 22, 1985) and Emily (born 1989). The family business doubled as a training ground: Zach has been publicly described as having worked side by side with his father and grandfather making gravestones during his youth. Those years in the shop, among granite dust and the low hum of equipment, shaped a childhood that mixed manual craft with small-town values.

Andrea continued to run the business after Daniel’s death in 2007, holding the shop together for more than a decade afterwards until her own passing in 2020. That sequence — purchase in the mid-1990s, Daniel’s death in 2007, Andrea’s stewardship through 2020 — maps a 25-year arc in which the family maintained continuity through change. The household produced two children who moved in different public directions: one toward a national acting career, another into private life overseas. Both, however, carried the imprint of a workshop where work and identity were braided.

The business: Fackler Monument Company as anchor

Fackler Monument Company is the geographical and social anchor in Daniel’s story. Founded earlier in the 20th century and later taken into Roerig hands, the shop is a locus of craft, commerce, and community ritual. In small towns, a monument company is more than a storefront: it is where families choose how loved ones will be remembered. It is also an employer, an intergenerational classroom, and a repository of local stories.

Key business moments:

• c. 1995 — Daniel and Andrea purchase Fackler Monument Company.
• 1990s–2000s — Daniel works in the shop alongside his father (the family patriarch) and with Andrea.
• Oct 12, 2007 — Daniel dies; Andrea carries the business forward.
• 2007–2020 — Andrea’s stewardship maintains continuity; the family remains visibly tied to the enterprise.

These dates mark not only business transactions but shifts in how the family managed succession, grief, and daily work. The shop’s continuity after 2007 suggests that the trade skills and the institutional knowledge were successfully transmitted within the family — a baton passed from one pair of hands to the next.

Children and the ripple outward

Zachary Roerig, born February 22, 1985, left Montpelier for a career in acting. His professional credits and public profile often point back to the small-town workshop where he learned discipline and the value of steady labor. The image of a future actor sanding a monument base is, in itself, cinematic: contrast, grit, and foundation.

Emily Ann Roerig, born 1989, appears in public family notices and is part of the broader tapestry of descendants; at times she is referenced with a married name and with children of her own, concrete signs of family continuity. The grandchildren — named in family records as among the living next-generation witnesses — represent the human line that passes through the shop and outward into the world.

Timeline (compact table)

The texture of memory

A monument business deals in lives compressed into names and dates; the paradox is that, while the product is final, the work itself is ongoing. Daniel’s life intersected those two states. He kept people’s stories visible in stone while his own story became part of the town’s memory. To grow up amid a stone shop is to learn certain rhythms: to respect precision, to accept permanence in one register and impermanence in another, to know that each commission carries with it someone else’s grief and gratitude.

He was part of a lineage — a son, a husband, a father, a craftsman — whose daily gestures were modest but consequential. The family’s continued operation of the shop after 2007 is not merely a business footnote; it is a record of how a local trade survives by being taught, shared, and maintained within a family.

A final snapshot

In a photograph of a small-town workshop you might find worn work gloves draped over a bench, an order ledger with neat dates, and a half-polished stone catching afternoon light. Those are the visible traces. Behind them, the human traces — laughter, instruction, grief, resilience — remain less easy to tally but no less real. Daniel Roerig’s life, measured in dates and in hands-on labor, left those traces in the town of Montpelier and in the family that kept the tools moving.