ELBERTON, Ga. — For more than 30 years, the hulking granite slabs inscribed with teachings in eight languages have raised profound and vexing issues: Why are they here? What do they mean? What do they say about life after Doomsday?

But confronted with a deep and sustained economic slowdown, residents here in the professed Granite Capital of the World are now pondering something a bit more mundane: Is there a way to turn a mysterious 237,746-pound monument known as the Georgia Guidestones into a moneymaker?

Only one man is said to know the identity of the benefactor who went by the name of R. C. Christian when he visited this East Georgia city in 1979 and paid for the display, supposedly on behalf of a group of others living outside Georgia.

“I made an oath to that man, and I can’t break that,” said Wyatt Martin, 82, the retired banker who helped broker the arrangement for the monument, which is 19 feet tall and resembles Stonehenge. “No one will ever know.”