Palmer Monument Company in Broken Bow, Nebraska announced the purchase of Sterling Monument Company in Sterling, Colorado on Aug 1st, 2019.
Sterling Monument provides monuments and cremation memorials in western Nebraska, southern Wyoming and in eastern Colorado to the Denver Metro area.
“We were already helping families and working with funeral homes to provide memorials in places like Scottsbluff, Torrington, Wyoming, Julesburg, Colorado as well as the western third of Kansas right up to the Colorado border,” said Chris Smith one of the owners of Palmer Monument. “We would often be doing work in the cemetery and their trucks would be installing memorials as well. When Grant Hogarth decided to retire it was a natural fit for us if we were just willing to expand a little further out. It would also kept a monument company that had been in business since 1918 open and running.”
Covering long distances is not new for the crew at Palmer Monument. They have sales and production plants in Broken Bow and Fremont and additional sales offices in Plainview, Grand Island, Kearney, North Platte, Scottsbluff and Garden City, Kansas. They also work with funeral homes as far south as Boise City, Oklahoma and north up to Mt Rushmore and the Rapid City, South Dakota area. With the expansion Cheyenne, Wyoming and Denver, Colorado will also become part of their normal installation runs.
Smith said, “I was working with a family last week on a memorial and they asked how far we delivered our monuments and that’s when it kind of hit me on how large we’ve grown. My answer always used to be most of Nebraska and the western edge of Kansas. That day it became Iowa to Denver, that western third of Kansas, clear up to Mt Rushmore and now the south half of Wyoming as well. ”
He also stated he is excited to add new folks to the team and very few changes will take place. “Thankfully the staff at Sterling Monument Company has lots of experience and they are excited to work with us. In Sterling, we will have two full time setting crews, a couple of designers and a few folks to do quotes and handle sales as they already have a network of funeral homes they help. We will try to share the load of designing and setting west of our main location in Broken Bow between our current team and the new Sterling crew. We are keeping all the staff there. A couple of folks have agreed to change rolls so we can grow. So really the only modification is that will bring all the production to Broken Bow to help control costs and keep the product quality consistent.”
Palmer Monument which first opened in 1927 as the Palmer-Jensen Monument Company and then was changed to its current name a few years later by the Bert Palmer family was sold in 1970 to Kevin Bloemker and Butch Smith. Over time the business grew to its current multiple locations.
Later they sold to their son’s Ted Bloemker and Chris Smith. Palmer Monument will now have 10 retail locations in Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado and work with over 120 sales representatives and funeral homes in those three states plus South Dakota and Wyoming.
