About

I wrote the name down in a field notebook and never found a better one. Joseph Ingham opened Cedar Rain Stone in the autumn of 1995 in a narrow storefront on Staten Island, with a display case of forty-three pieces he had accumulated over the previous several years through estate sales, mineral shows, and a handful of private collectors who trusted him enough to sell. The name came from a field notebook entry he made during a collecting trip in the high desert of New Mexico, where a sudden afternoon rain turned the dry cedar scrub silver and left the exposed stone on the hillside looking almost wet. He wrote the phrase down and never found a better one.

The first years were genuinely uncertain. The shop was open four days a week because Joseph was still traveling to source material and could not afford to hire anyone. He kept a handwritten ledger of every piece sold, who bought it, and what they said about it. That ledger is still on the shelf behind the counter, now in its seventh volume. Around 2003, a small editorial in a regional design magazine brought in a different kind of customer: interior designers and architects who wanted decorative stone objects rather than collector specimens. Joseph did not change what he stocked, but he began to understand that the same piece could mean very different things to different people, and that his job was to describe it accurately and let the buyer decide.