The Gold Star Families Memorial Monument rests at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus streets in one of Grove City’s parks. The bold, black granite tribute stands 7 feet tall and 14 feet wide, and the two benches facing its four panels are each inscribed with a different image and accompanying word: homeland, family, patriot, sacrifice. But the most striking part of the tribute is a void carved into the highest part of the granite — the shape of a saluting soldier.

Grove City unveiled the memorial in May 2016, with funding assistance from the Hershel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to establish permanent memorials across the United States as a way to honor the families and relatives of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.

Columbus’ Modlich Monument Co. created the Grove City memorial, and it’s one of many they’ve done. Company founder Linus Modlich began designing, creating and engraving monuments in Germany before moving to America in 1927, eventually opening his Franklin Monument Co. in Columbus in 1936. (The business was renamed in the 1980s.)

Along with its work creating cemetery headstones and commercial architectural engravings, the fourth-generation family business has helped communities throughout Ohio and beyond honor and remember their local veterans with dozens of stone tributes. In addition to memorials in Ohio communities such as Hilliard, Pickerington, Canal Winchester and Delaware, a Modlich Monument Co. memorial stands at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia.