Cornerstone Visionary Recognition Recipient, 2026
Prepared by: Ashley Foley, Foley Communications & Consulting
Some businesses survive a generation. A rare few survive four. Campbell Monument has been quietly doing its work in this community since 1909: carving names into stone, honouring families, and serving Belleville and eastern Ontario through every era that has followed. It has outlasted recessions, a pandemic, two world wars, and the kind of ordinary turbulence that ends most businesses long before they reach a century. It is still here, innovatively employee-owned, and still the only monument company in North America known to offer a perpetual guarantee on the monuments it manufactures and sells.
That kind of longevity does not happen by accident. It happens because, at a pivotal moment in the company’s history, one man looked at the people working alongside him and made a decision that accountants said was impossible, bankers said was foolish, and time has since proven he was exactly right. William “Bill” Campbell did not just build a monument company. He built an ownership model for community stewardship that the rest of his industry has never caught up to.
This year, the Belleville Chamber of Commerce proudly honours Campbell Monument with the 2026 Visionary Cornerstone Award. This recognition is not simply about building a business that has lasted over a century, but about doing it in a way few in this industry had ever thought to try.
The Campbell story does not begin in Belleville. It begins in Stirling, Ontario, where a young man named John Campbell had moved from Ormsby to work at a monument business his wife’s relatives. John joined in the trade, and for a time the business carried both names: Campbell & Moore Monuments. A sharp eye can still find those old metal tags on the backs of monuments in cemeteries across the region, quiet proof of a partnership that launched a legacy.
In 1909, John left Stirling and established Trenton Marble Works in a small house on the corner of Front and Ford. His son Arnold came home to help with the family business when he fell ill with tuberculosis, but John recovered, and Arnold stayed to continue to work in the trade. Then, in 1931, at 30 years old, Arnold Clifton Campbell, better known as A.C., struck out on his own.
In that year A.C. moved the business to Belleville and opened Campbell Monument Company Ltd. at 21 Bridge Street, just across the bridge from downtown. A horseshoe still hung over the door of the old blacksmith’s shop he moved into, possibly a little bit of luck as he began building the business further on his own. One of his first and only employees at the time was an Irish stone cutter named Jack Power. In those early years, crates of granite that arriving from the quarry bore the label ‘A.C. Campbell’, and, they still do, to this day.
Fast forward 20 years to 1951, A.C.’s son William (Bill) joined his father’s business. They worked side by side, building a standard of quality that both men believed in completely. When A.C. stepped back, Bill took ownership in 1958. And then Bill started thinking about what came next.
Bill Campbell was a reader. He was interested in business models, in accounting, in the mechanics of how companies were structured and why most of them eventually fell apart. He was also paying close attention to the people who worked alongside him: skilled craftsmen who had spent years, sometimes decades, learning a trade that could not be taught quickly. Hand-tooled lettering, precision stone work, and an eye for detail and design. The kind of craftsmanship that takes a minimum of five years to learn properly and a lifetime to master.
As the new owner and lead figure of Campbell Monument, Bill understood something that most business owners in his position fail to observe: that the value of his company lived in the people he worked with. Without them, there was no Campbell Monument. So, as he moved into his late 40s, still vigorous, still building, he began working through a question that accountants and bankers pushed back against because it was such a new idea.
How does one give a company to the people who help build it and keep it alive?
Bill’s brother Paul, an accountant with Ernst & Young, was involved in the early discussions and was just as inquisitive and forward thinking. While other professionals said it couldn’t be done, Bill wasn’t asking for their opinion; he was asking and calculating how he could make it happen.
The answer, worked out painstakingly over several years with lawyers, bankers, and eventually with Wilkinson & Company — a relationship that continues to this day — was the Employee Share Ownership Plan that became the foundation of Campbell Monument’s future. Bill had found a way to sell Campbell Monument to his employee’s, and the first shareholders’ agreement was signed in 1984. Bill didn’t ask his employees to come up with the money. Instead, he financed the purchase himself, using the business itself as collateral; effectively selling the company to his employees on his own terms, on his own dime, so that the people who helped keep the business moving forward could own it themselves.
“Who does that?” one of his successors asks today, and the question is not rhetorical. In the history of Canadian business, especially at that time, very few people had tried anything like it.
The Campbell Monument Employee Share Ownership Plan is not a co-operative. That distinction matters and the people who run the company today will tell you clearly: it is employee ownership, with a precise legal structure that has been carefully maintained over four decades.
Like most businesses, there are good years, and there are tough years. Once concept that is still held today is that in those good years, a portion of profits is set aside and split equally amongst all employee shareholders. It is not divided proportionally by how many shares a shareholder holds, but equally, person by person.
“The employee who has been here two and a half years gets the same portion as the employee who has been here 25,” said Kathleen Robinson, who has been with the company for 37 years. Profits are used to buy shares, so ownership grows from the inside, organically, at a pace tied to the company’s performance.
When an employee retires, they sell their shares back to a trust, which acts as the guaranteed buyer, so no one leaves the company worrying about needing to find a buyer for their shares. The share trust holds it, the annual window opens once a year when financial statements have been shared with all shareholders at an AGM, and the transaction happens.
The nature of the business also means that Campbell Monument employees work intensely seasonal hours, with its busy season in spring, summer and fall, being quieter in the winter months. In alignment with this fluctuation, the company also built in payroll savings plans, benefits, and hour-banking structures so that staff who work 50 or more hour weeks in the peak season have the opportunity to draw equalized pay year-round, carry banked hours into the winter, and apply for EI where appropriate. Bill built employee wellbeing into the ownership model, not as an afterthought, but as a design principle.
The result is a retention rate that speaks for itself. Employees who join Campbell Monument tend to stay. Many of the first cohort of shareholders worked 30 or more years before retiring, most within a decade of each other. Current President, Kathleen Robinson joined in 1989 for a summer graphic design job, decided to stay, and is still here today. “The reason this career path happened,” she says, “is because of how Bill set this up for us.”
Employee ownership was not the only unprecedented thing Bill Campbell had on his mind. Sometime in the 1970s, before the shareholder plan was finalized, and before the move to Dundas Street, he created something that has never been replicated in the monument business anywhere else in North America, possibly in the world.
He called it the Campbell-Craft Guarantee.
The concept was simple: for an additional 5% of the total purchase price of an eligible upright monument, that money would be placed in trust to cover any damage. Should anything ever happen to that monument, whether it be vandalism, a backhoe hitting it, a lightning strike, a fallen tree, or anything else, it will be repaired or replaced, for free. No deductible, no annual fees, no expiry. No family member is required to be alive, or present, or even be aware that the guarantee exists. The certificate is filed with the family, the cemetery, Scotia Trust, and Campbell Monument, and it stands in perpetuity.
To start that trust in the 1970s, Bill needed $250,000 in collateral. He mortgaged his own family home to do that.
Today, that trust holds several millions of dollars. Every year, after claims are settled and expenses are paid, a portion of the interest and investment gain is freed up for cemetery restoration and the preservation of historically significant memorials. The restoration of the Susanna Moodie monument at the Belleville Cemetery was funded through the Campbell-Craft trust. When a wave of vandalism struck several of Quinte West and Belleville’s cemeteries in 2021, more than 900 monuments were damaged, Campbell Monument stepped up and volunteered their employee’s time, and the Campbell-Craft trust provided funding to help clean and repair them all.
The trust also supports a grant program that provides funding for monuments of great historical significance in public spaces; possibly for commemorations that help tell the stories of communities we live in.
Generally, most people assume that a cemetery looks after the monuments within it, but that really is not the case. Perpetual care, as cemeteries define it, might mean that the grass gets cut or the roads plowed in the winter. The monuments themselves continue to belong to the interment rights holder, and when generations have passed and that family is gone, there is typically no one left to care for it. Bill Campbell believed that monument builders had a responsibility that did not end at the point of sale. Campbell Monument is, as far as anyone in the industry knows, the only company in the world that has acted on that belief in this way.
By 1989, Campbell Monument had outgrown its current location. A property developer approached about acquiring the parcel on Bridge Street, and the timing aligned with what Bill had already been thinking. The site was earmarked for the new courthouse building, and the granite blocks arriving on flatbed trucks could already barely navigate the old downtown lot.
Bill commissioned a custom-built facility at 712 Dundas Street West, positioned on the highway and off of the 401 for easier access, closer to the cemeteries, with room to manufacture, store, and grow. In February of 1989 the team and offices relocated to the new building. Shortly after, the original Bridge Street building was carefully disassembled by Bel-Con and trucked up Highway 2, piece by piece. The structure was rebuilt behind the new facility and still stands there today as their fabrication back shop.
From that new purpose-built location on Dundas Street West, Campbell Monument has continued to grow. The Pembroke location, which opened in 1972, remains a secondary hub with its own sales, setting, and lettering teams. In 1994 Lindsay Monumental Works was purchased. Then in 2019, Simpson Memorials and Cobourg Monumental Works were acquired. The Cobourg, Port Hope, and Lindsay sales offices also still serve those communities they are in. In total, the company currently operates five locations with approximately 30 employees across them all, supported by outside sales representatives in rural areas where the need for monuments remains, and the distance to a showroom is significant.
In 2006, Campbell Monument became the official Ontario supplier for the Last Post Fund, an organization that provides funding to help cover the costs of a dignified funeral, burial, and monument for those who have served in the military. Shortly thereafter, also became a supplier of memorials to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Veterans Affairs Canada when needed.
The company continues to use traditional techniques that other monument businesses have moved on from, like hand-tooled lettering and real gold leaf gilding, while always implementing new technologies and safety programs to meet current expectations. Sales representatives are always happy to show families that process and the craftsmanship, it is what sets them apart from their competitors. Families visiting the Belleville office can look through a window in the showroom into the production area, and can see and hear the work happening. That transparency is intentional.
As the years go by, the shareholder ownership cycle continues. Employees are invited to invest, retirees sell their shares back into the trust, and new employees grow into new owners, the model Bill built in 1984 keeps doing what he designed it to do: transition the company into the hands of the people who continue to build it.
Most Canadian businesses without a succession plan will close when their owners retire or pass away. The province already organizes events about this to assist in that succession planning. The federal government is working on tax incentives to make employee ownership more attractive, including a proposed measure that would exempt the first $10 million of a business sale to employees from capital gains tax entirely.
Bill Campbell had the idea, and solved this problem in 1984. Not without risk — he mortgaged his house for a company he was passing along — but thoughtfully, and deliberately. He believed with the conviction that a business built on skilled people and long relationships deserved to survive as something more than a line item on someone else’s acquisition sheet.
The Campbell-Craft Guarantee also that same kind of thinking applied to the main product itself. A monument is not a transaction; it is a promise. Bill knew that a promise without teeth was no promise at all. So, he created a system where the promise was funded, maintained, and honoured.
That is what vision looks like, and what it can be when it is built to last.
The Belleville Chamber of Commerce proudly recognizes Campbell Monument as the 2026 Visionary Cornerstone Award Recipient.
The crates still arrive from the quarries with A.C.’s label on them. The Campbell-Craft Guarantee trust is still funded and growing. The shareholders still meet. The craftsmen are still here, learning and teaching the next generation, and owners, a trade that takes years to learn, but only a moment to fall in love with.
Some things are built to last. Campbell Monument made that concept a reality.
Late 1800s – John Campbell moves to Stirling, Ontario, joins his wife’s relatives’ monument business. The business becomes known as Campbell & Moore Monuments.
1901 – Arnold Clifton Campbell (A.C.) is born. He joins his father’s business as a young man when John falls ill.
1909 – John Campbell establishes Trenton Marble Works in Trenton, Ontario. The business later becomes Campbell & Son Monuments.
1931 – A.C. Campbell, age 30, establishes Campbell Monument Company Ltd. at 21 Bridge Street, Belleville, Ontario. His first employee is an Irish stone cutter named Jack Power.
1951 – William (Bill) Campbell joins his father A.C. in the family business.
1958 – Bill Campbell takes over ownership and operations of Campbell Monument.
Early 1970s – Bill Campbell creates the Campbell-Craft Guarantee — the only warranty of its kind in the monument industry in North America. He mortgages his family home to provide the $250,000 in collateral required to establish the Campbell-Craft Guarantee trust fund.
1972 – Campbell Monument opens a location in Pembroke, Ontario.
1984 – The first Employee Share Ownership shareholders’ agreement is signed, the culmination of more than five years of planning with lawyers, bankers, and accountants at Wilkinson & Company. Bill finances the purchase himself; employees acquire ownership without paying cash upfront.
1989 – Campbell Monument relocates to its current home at 712 Dundas Street West, Belleville. The original Bridge Street building is disassembled and trucked to the new site, where it still stands today.
2006 – Campbell Monument becomes the Ontario supplier for the Last Post Fund, and later a supplier of memorials to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
2018–2019 – A new location opens in Arnprior; Simpson Memorials and Cobourg Monumental Works are acquired. Campbell Monument now operates five locations across eastern Ontario.
Ongoing – The Campbell-Craft Trust continues to fund monument restorations, historical memorial preservation, and emergency repairs across Ontario. Employee share ownership continues to evolve as new generations of staff join, invest, and retire.
2026 – Honoured with the Visionary Cornerstone Award from the Belleville Chamber of Commerce, recognizing over a century of innovation, craftsmanship, and a model of business ownership that was decades ahead of its time.Story prepared by Ashley Foley, Foley Communications & Consulting
Story prepared by Ashley Foley, Foley Communications & Consulting.
