HUTTO — It all started because Greg Ray wanted a hippo for his yard.
“We moved here in 2016 and saw all the hippos around town. We’d never seen anything like this before,” said Ray, who co-owns Set In Stone Statuary with his wife, Terra. The business creates concrete molds of beasts and other figures.
Hutto is home to 3,000 to 10,000 hippo statues — estimates vary wildly — but Ray could not find one that quite suited him. So he decided to make his own.
The town’s proliferation of hippos can be linked to Hutto High School’s popular mascot, which may have something to do with a legend about one escaping from a circus train generations ago.
“I went online and bought a small hippo mold and poured a couple of them and put them out in our landscape,” Ray said. “My wife took pictures and posted them on social media and people loved them and told us we should sell them, so we thought, why not?”
Ray started designing his own hippos, creating molds and pouring the concrete statues in his garage. Everything is custom-made so people can choose a hippo painted in team colors or, like one recent order, wearing a hula skirt.
“We make statues start to finish. A lot of statuary companies will buy molds from professional mold makers and they’ll cast them and sell the final product. What we do is start completely from scratch, so from design to 3-D printing the actual model, then once we have the model we’ll make the mold, then cast, paint and sell to the customer,” Ray said.
Ray will also custom paint hippo statues purchased through the Hutto Area Chamber of Commerce, which gets its hippos from an out-of-town company.
Set In Stone’s art isn’t confined to Hippo Nation. Ray also designs high school mascots for other local towns.
“A couple of years ago the Greater Taylor Chamber of Commerce reached out so now I have a flying duck we sell. The Jarrell booster club, I worked with them to develop a cougar. Thorndale wanted a bulldog. So word is spreading,” Ray said.
He even created a 400-pound monarch butterfly that is on display in Granbury.
Eventually the business overflowed his garage. On Feb. 10, a stormy Saturday, people waited in the rain to get into Set in Stone Statuary’s new storefront and order their own customized hippo during the grand opening of the company’s first retail location.
The new space has samples of different statues Ray makes, and includes a work area in the back for pouring concrete and painting the designs.
In addition to crafting his own statues, Ray offers mold-making for sculpture artists. He worked with local sculptor Elizabeth Bonura to make concrete statues from her designs that are on display in Georgetown, Cedar Park and Bee Cave.
“She makes sculptures maybe six inches tall and scans it into a three-dimensional digital file. I take the file and 3-D print it at the size she wants the finished piece so we can make a mold and cast it in concrete for display,” Ray said. “It’s a good option for local artists, they don’t have to create a six-foot sculpture and carry it around, they can create something smaller and we can make the mold a larger size.”
Set In Stone Statuary’s retail location is open by appointment only, but orders can also be placed through an online catalog.
The company offers free delivery and placement within the Hutto area.
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