Author: fitz

Question: What does that glass of Bulleit bourbon or Lagavulin Scotch have in common with a Chicago water tower and a wooden hot tub?

Answer: They all belong to the culture of tight cooperage, a subject on which John Cox is a fount of information.

I met John on a sweltering afternoon in 2018 while delivering a small piece of furniture to the Hudson Valley. Anissa Kapsales had invited me to meet her at John’s workplace, located in a large warehouse building on the outskirts of High Falls (population 627), about 90 minutes north of New York City. While I have long appreciated the fruits of the distiller’s art, I confess I hadn’t given much thought to the oak barrels that play such an important part in their production. John was the ideal person to enlighten me; a polymath with the personality of a showman and boundless enthusiasm for his work, he’s a natural teacher.

John was born in Philadelphia in 1969. His father was a tool and die maker who’d followed in his own father’s footsteps. They hoped John would become a doctor and not work with his hands. Oh well.

In high school John played music. He attended Muhlenberg College for a year of pre-med studies, then transferred to the Esther Boyer School of Music at Temple University. Many of his fellow students had been studying music seriously for years, and he soon realized that he was not in a position to compete – he’d never get a chair or play on Broadway. However, he knew some luthiers and thought “if I can’t play, I can build.”

He did a traditional apprenticeship with Richard Buccigrosse and John DelVecchio, who ran a millwork shop in his South Philadelphia neighborhood. Richard made flamenco guitars, in addition to fabricating millwork and repairing antiques. Richard was very strict – the shop culture was closer to that of a Philadelphia furniture shop in the 18^th century than in the 20^th. John worked full days in the shop, unpaid, then went to his job as a short order cook in a diner.

Affordable shop space was plentiful in Philadelphia in the 1980s; the recession had hit the area hard. John opened his own shop, and Richard sent turning and millwork jobs his way so he could spend more of his own time on flamenco guitars. On weekends, John took finishing classes with George Frank (author of “Adventures in Wood Finishing”) at the Olde Mill Cabinet Shoppe on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Meanwhile – and this is where John’s story starts to sound like a Who’s Who of woodworking – the Snyderman Gallery, located a couple of blocks from John’s shop, was regularly exhibiting studio furniture. John developed a niche as a finisher, catering to local studio furniture makers and doing repairs and touch-up for the gallery. He specialized in ebonizing, French polishing and work with color, using a lot of aniline dye. At the age of 21 he found himself repairing a Gary Knox Bennett desk. Several graduates of Wendell Castle’s school had opened a group shop in Fishtown; John became the finisher for the group and worked with Michael Hurwitz and Peter Pierobon, among others.

In 1994 he took a job as foreman in a finishing shop, Finish Resources Studio, in New York City. They developed specialty finishes for designers, such as cerusing (decorative pore filling) for Tom O’Brien of Aero. “George [Frank] taught me the process,” John says. “It was us in the workroom that developed it.”

Four years later, he met Danish craftsman Jan Engberg and his son, Ian, who had a shop making high-end furniture; John ran their finishing shop from 1998 to 2001. “For the fourth or fifth time in my life, I find myself working with an old European master,” he says with appreciation for these opportunities. “I kept falling into these relationships with them, sort of avuncular. I’m very fortunate – to be working with these insanely talented older Europeans.” Working for the Engbergs, John did jobs for high-end interior designers such as Steven Harris (a protégé of Robert Stern) and Lucien Rees-Roberts. “Everything got published – Elle Décor, Architectural Digest. This was before Instagram,” he adds as a slightly wistful side note (that’s quite familiar to me). “We would never get pictures of anything unless it got published.”

Lucien designed some “wacky stuff,” says John, that was inspired by 20^th-century designers Jean Michel Frank and Samuel Marx. They used a lot of goat skin, cow hide, leather, parchment and gilding, and produced pieces destined for swanky apartments in such upscale areas as Central Park West. Recalling the kinds of orders they got from the designers, John says “’Let’s do the rosewood tables we did for the last client…let’s do the leather closet doors we did for Cabo – let’s do that for this client, but bigger.’ They sent me to Cabo right during the mad cow disease outbreak … with 42 cow hides! I feel like we worked for everybody that ran Lehman Brothers,” as well as entertainers such as John Leguizamo. “They flew me all over the world. It was all custom work.”

Then came 9/11. “We stood on the roof of the shop and watched it go down,” John says. “It affected our business. I wanted to leave New York.”

At a finishing convention in St. Paul the following year, he met Greg Johnson, who worked for Wendell Castle. Wendell had opened up a 42-man furniture factory called Icon Design outside Rochester; they were so busy they’d reached a bottleneck in production. Greg asked John to join them, and he did. As you’d expect, the work was meticulous. Each piece involved about 21 quality control checks, right down to razor-fine specs for the sheen of the finish. While working for Wendell, he met the sculptor Albert Paley and took on jobs for him, too, flying to installations around the country where a piece of work needed repair due to damage suffered in a move.

The downside: all of this work involved a lot of chemicals. John was spraying urethane and lacquer – “doing great things that were not good for me. But I got really good at it and got a reputation…”

After a year in Rochester, he was ready for a change of scene. They moved to the Hudson Valley, where John opened a one-man shop combining restoration work with commissioned pieces like a goatskin side table. He found himself running all over the area for jobs that barely paid the bills. Even with freelance gigs for Albert Paley, it was tough to make a living.  

One day in 2015 John was talking with a friend who planned to open a mushroom-growing operation. “I said ‘I’d love a change. Why don’t you bring me in?’” His friend suggested something different. “Do you know there’s a barrel crisis right now? Why don’t you make barrels?” About a week later, Time ran an article about the barrel shortage, which has been exacerbated by a federal mandate that American distillers must use newly charred oak – in other words, a whisky barrel gets one-time use. Kentucky cooperages couldn’t keep up – they were working with lead times of 18 months. Craft distilling was a burgeoning business, but distilleries couldn’t find barrels.

John discovered that there was scarcely any information available on how to make barrels. Fine Woodworking had published an article about coopered joinery, and he found another on coopering by Tage Frid, but that was about it. It was truly, he says, a lost art. “So I bought three different barrels from three cooperages, took them apart and reverse-engineered them. It was a cipher. What’s the formula? It was like a cryptogram.” A cryptogram indeed – the research and development for Quercus Cooperage took more than two years. In the meantime, John was still running his furniture restoration business.

There are three types of coopers

1. Tight coopers make watertight containers.

2. Slack coopers make containers for dry goods. Everything shipped in the 19^th century went in these containers, which were made by giant factories – nails, cotton, tobacco, salted meat and fish, gunpowder, oysters, fruit, cement.

3. White coopers have traditionally made household containers such as buckets, butter churns, bowls and pails. In Japan, white coopers made koji trays.

When he heard about a large collection of 19^th-centuring coopering tools for sale by a museum in Ottawa, he bought it. Then he set about learning what each one was, and how it should be used. “There was every tool you would need in a cooperage. Some looked familiar; some I had no idea what they were. Eric Sloane had some of them in his books; one of the first books Taunton did was a republication of a book of tools from England. I identified some from that.”

Next, he worked to figure out how to get his 20th-century machine tools to do what these hand tools did in the 1800s. “I held these 19^th-century tools in my hand and said ‘How can I get my 3-horsepower shaper to do the same thing?’ How would I make this stave?’”

Here’s where his jazz background came in handy: there’s a lot of math in both fields. “Embracing the mathematics behind it really helped me figure it out,” he says, noting that Johannes Kepler had laid the groundwork for calculus by trying to figure the volume of a wine barrel. “It was becoming an obsession.”

He broke the process of barrel-making down into five stages:

1. Acquire and air-dry the wood. It has to be air-dried, not kilned. He bought locally grown oak logs and had them quartersawn, then stickered.

2. Mill the staves. He had shaper knives custom-ground.

3. Find the steel for the rings, then make the rings and hoops.

4. Toast and char the oak to the client’s specifications. Toasting the sugars in the wood is an art that can make or break a whiskey.

5. Assembly. The point is to make a watertight cask. “It can’t even have a pin hole.”

On Dec. 22, 2017, the Winter Solstice, John succeeded in getting a barrel to hold water for the first time.

He’s now one of 33 cooperages in North America, and he makes his barrels largely by hand. A cadre of “meddling woodworking friends, machining savants and a welder” have helped along the way. As with most highly skilled custom work that uses top-quality materials, the economic side of the business remains a challenge. The wood for a barrel comes in at around $150. You can buy a barrel for less than half that from a major manufacturer.

John recently expanded into another of the traditional cooper’s arts: tanks for fermentation. Stoutridge Vineyard and Distillery, his regular client in Upstate New York, asked for an 800-gallon tank, the kind used for Scottish whisky. Adds John: “That’s also what the soy sauce guys ferment in. Before Covid hit, everyone was starting to make shoyu. But no one’s making barrels for shoyu; they were using stainless steel. You’re not going to get the flavor profiles you want from fermenting in steel. In Japan they use open-tank traditional wooden fermentation. No one makes them here.” He made a 2-gallon prototype, and things took off.

“I pivoted into this culinary world. This koji thing that’s happening – they’ve been fermenting rice for 7,000 years. No one in America was making koji trays. If I hadn’t pivoted into the culinary stuff last fall I don’t know where I would be now.”

Brad Leone of Bon Appetit discovered John through Instagram; a chef John knows had asked him to make koji trays, and his name and pictures quickly made their way around that community. “They came to the shop and posted some stuff and it really blew up. [People] want to do this traditional Japanese work” – think sauerkraut, or kimchi – “but they don’t have the traditional objects to make it.”

Still, he says, it remains challenging economically. Margins are slim. “I’m a struggling one-man shop no different from any other.” Every barrel is custom made and takes time. Even with the technical challenges involved in figuring out his methods, John says the biggest learning curve has related to shipping and logistics. Instagram has helped him market the work; it’s one thing to get press in a print magazine, but there’s a two (or more)-month lag between the writing and publication. There’s no lag-time in Internet publishing, which makes it easier to change course swiftly.

Because of Covid, John’s craft distillery and brewer clients are closed, so the culinary stuff is filling his time. There’s a market, for now; it’s also more affordable. He says he’s the only person making the small tanks in America right now and adds, “I’m 5’6” so they actually call me a mini cooper.”

—Nancy Hiller, author of Kitchen Think and Making Things Work

In the fall of 2005 I found a message on my shop’s answering machine from Kelly Mehler, who had seen my Fine Woodworking article on designing built-ins and wondered whether I’d like to teach a cabinetmaking class the following summer at his school on the outskirts of Berea, Ky. I was single at the time, running my business with one employee and dividing my evenings and weekends between finishing my house (installing wooden floors and trim, framing and drywalling stud walls to subdivide the attic, painting) and establishing a garden. I’d recently turned 46 and had no grand vision for how I wanted the rest of my life to look; it was all I could do to keep things together emotionally and financially day by day. So Kelly’s invitation was like a ray of sunshine. I leapt at the chance to teach and chose the week of my 47^th birthday for the class to ensure I’d have something cheerful going on.

I was thrilled to find the school located in an idyllic setting at the end of a long gravel drive. Surrounded by rolling hills and forest, it was a two-story building with tall windows and plenty of natural light. There was an enviably equipped machine shop on the ground floor, a bench room above and air conditioning — a serious boon in the Midwestern summer. As an instructor, I stayed in the delightful cabin next to the shop, while Kelly and his wife, Teri, lived just up the hill in an old log house built for Swedish weaver Anna Ernberg, who had been hired decades earlier to lead the weaving program at Berea College. The class was small, the people friendly, the food great. I could not have imagined a happier introduction to teaching.

Over the next several years I taught a few more times at Kelly’s school. One year, he and Teri invited me to join them for a Fourth of July party at the home of some friends whose house was high up on a hill with a great view of the fireworks display. A bunch of people at the party worked for Berea College, and I was fascinated to learn a bit about the institution, which is committed to educating the young people of Appalachia and — astonishingly — tuition-free. What a concept, especially at a time when so many students go tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars into debt for a college degree!

Fast forward a few years. Kelly and Teri had retired and sold their property to Berea College, which re-opened the shop as the Woodworking School at Pine Croft, with North Bennet Street School alum Andy Glenn at its head. Andy contacted me to ask whether I’d like to teach in the summer of 2020, and we settled on a week-long class on my version of Voysey’s 1898 design for a two-heart chair. We also agreed that I would give a presentation one evening about English Arts & Crafts furniture for students and members of the local community who might be interested. The topic seemed ideal because I could see all kinds of parallels between the values upheld by Berea College and the philosophy of John Ruskin that had given the Arts & Crafts movement its spark. For example, Ruskin held that traditional craft work, pursued in circumstances that allow the individual craftsperson some freedom of expression, poses challenges, requires endless learning and allows for wholesome satisfactions, all of which Ruskin thought essential to a fully human life. Nor did Ruskin wish a fully human life only for those of his socio-economic level, but for all.

That class would have taken place a few weeks ago. But as with so many other events this year, it was cancelled, along with the other classes at Pine Croft scheduled for 2020. Berea College was among the first to send students home and end on-campus activities in March, the decision based on the institution’s avowed commitment to the kinship of all people and the dignity of all labor. Such respect implies “an obligation for each other’s safety and wellbeing.” said Aaron Beale, Director of Student Craft, when I spoke with him recently. He added: “We are lucky we’re in a situation where we can make those decisions. It seemed clear that we couldn’t start the summer with those early classes in May and June, and it seemed unlikely that there would be a miraculous change” going into the later months. It was a hard decision to make; Andy had worked hard to pull together a group of instructors for the inaugural season, but Aaron said “it didn’t seem right to string people along for something that wasn’t likely to happen at all,” considering that classes would have involved people traveling, then being taught in confined spaces.

Despite the cancellation, I wanted to learn more about how Berea College’s commitments expressed so many of Ruskin’s convictions regarding education and work. So I arranged a conference call with Aaron, Andy and Chris Miller, associate director and curator of the Appalachian Center.

History

Founded in 1855 by John Fee, a Presbyterian minister who was an abolitionist, Berea College originally focused on providing an education to freed people of color. That mission changed in 1904, when the college was forced to segregate by the Day Law. The college, Aaron told me, “elected to focus on the education of white students from Appalachia here in Berea, and split its endowment to also form The Lincoln Institute in Shelby County, Ky.” This school operated as an all-black boarding high school from 1912 to 1966.

“At that time, a college education was far rarer than today,” Chris elaborated. “It was considered elite. Berea was a pioneer in educating common people, whether freed slaves, children of farmers, whatever. One of the ways we differed from other colleges providing a liberal arts education: we had a more progressive idea of what education means.” Leaders of the college’s policies integrated the ideals of the Sloyd and YMCA movements, which focused on educating the whole person. Early in the 20^th century they ran an outreach program — a preacher would preach a sermon, then someone might provide the latest instruction on planting beans, followed by someone else discussing Shakespeare. (Returning to echoes of Arts & Crafts values, this was not unlike the broad range of character-enriching programs offered to members of the local community by Englishman C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicrafts when it moved to the Cotswolds, west of London: the idea was to provide education for everybody and for the whole person.)

Since then, the leaders of Berea College have continually experimented with how to put those same ideals into practice. Today, for example, in addition to programs in agriculture they have emphasized organic and sustainable local agriculture. Another example: the college has a four-year liberal arts nursing degree — nursing is not typically taught in the context of the liberal arts. There’s a program in technology and applied design, and all students in the business school have to take the liberal arts core. A program called “Entrepreneurship for the Public Good” responds to the urgent need to create sustainable businesses in Appalachia, ideally to encourage students to stay in the region instead of leaving. “We expose them to an ethic of service,” Chris said, “because it infuses the institution.”

Since 1892 the college has been tuition-free. How do you manage that? I asked. The greatest factor in making it possible is a $1.2 billion endowment. Unlike most colleges with substantial endowments, which re-invest interest income back into the endowment, Aaron pointed out that Berea College “puts 100 percent of the return…to work for students, paying their tuition and offering the other programs that make Berea so special.” Another significant factor is that most students qualify for federal, state and other financial aid. One of the most unusual features of Berea College is its student-run income-producing enterprises, such as the college farm store and the Boone Tavern, which the college built in 1909 to house visitors and still operates today. From its inception, the tuition-free education has also depended on income from the sale of student-made products in the crafts of wood, weaving, ceramics and broom making. Beyond attempting to generate income for tuition, these enterprises broaden the range of educational offerings to encompass hands-on skills that are rarely taught at academic institutions of higher education.

Despite all these sources of tuition-supporting revenue, the college must still raise $4 to $5 million annually through an appeal to donors known as “The Berea Fund.”

The college also has a Forestry Department — appropriate, considering that the institution owns nearly 10,000 forested acres held in a carbon sequester program. It’s the oldest privately managed forest in Kentucky and one of the oldest in the entire United States. Berea College has been a pioneer in managing forest sustainably. They log in the least-damaging way — with horses — and just hired a second team of horse loggers. Although the college does not offer a degree in forestry as such, its forestry studies are run through the agriculture department. Wendy Warren runs the forestry outreach center and lives in the cabin where instructors at Kelly’s woodworking school used to stay.

“It really is all about the forest,” added Aaron, returning to the reasoning behind the college’s purchase of the Mehlers’ home. “The [Pine Croft] property is about 15 acres and borders the college forest on two sides. We didn’t want to see that property subdivided into 15 properties.” The Mehlers’ former home also included two structures that tie in with the college’s mission: the main house (now a bed and breakfast, which fits the mission of bringing people into the forest) and the woodworking school, which furthers opportunities to live up to one of the college’s principle missions, a commitment to the dignity of all labor, not just white-collar professions.

Berea and Craft

The town of Berea, which grew up around the original college, has long been recognized as a center of craft and cultivated a market for tourists interested in buying work that’s locally made. In recent years, Berea’s approach has shifted from simply promoting the sale of completed objects to exhibitions of craft in process, as well as encouraging visitors to participate in the making. This, too, factored into the opening of the Woodworking School at Pine Croft. Although Berea College has long had a woodworking department with staff instructors, Pine Croft would allow the college to bring other craftspeople who teach into the area. “The college has been limited vis-a-vis student craft,” Andy explained. “There are typically 20 to 25 students; most have never held a woodworking tool before their first day. Pine Croft allows us to expose our student population to master craftspeople and brings master craftspeople into the region, which is important to the mission of college. Again, it’s about the dignity of labor. Woodworking is a trade that deserves respect. Bringing high-quality work to the area is another way the college sees itself partnering with the region” — to which Chris added: “It helps people see that Appalachia is not just a ‘deficit situation,’ but has a lot to offer the world.”

Andy’s job goes well beyond teaching; he’s also responsible for making products for sale — rolling pins, cutting boards and a wooden stool with a hickory bark seat, the last of these made with wood and bark from the college forest. The proceeds from sales help support the costs associated with tuition.

“My job is to train the students so that we can make the crafts,” Andy explained. This is not as simple as it sounds. The most profitable way to make these items would be by adopting some modified form of assembly-line production, in which each student would master just one part of the process instead of learning the whole. But that would be inconsistent with the college’s commitment to training students for their own benefit in addition to giving them a way to help support their own tuition. It’s a challenge to convey the richness of handcraft while being as productive as possible.

“It’s a real tension,” Aaron acknowledged. “Andy has two jobs that are compatible, but both extremely demanding — running wood craft, the woodworking component of the student craft program, but in addition, Andy also is the head of the Woodworking School at Pine Croft. Andy really does do two separate full-time jobs.” As with the other student craft programs, the goal since the 1890s has been to run an enterprise to support the running of the college. Aaron conceded that for the past century, these programs haven’t made a profit; in fact, they regularly run a deficit. But instructors and students do still approach the work as a business; they face real production demands, as opposed to the ethos in most craft schools, which allow students a temporary respite from the financial and time constraints of regular jobs so that they can really focus on mastering skills. Andy has to teach and provide an environment that links up with the college’s mission, all while turning out saleable goods.

The wood craft program also takes special orders, which make up between 30-40 percent of their work. These jobs have run the gamut from simple recycling bins with solid wood doors to pieces of fine craft, such as a recent run of 18 chairs in the Federal style for the president’s home on campus. Andy and the students will also build a 17’-long table. In addition, Andy has increased the use of hand tools. The same elevation of appreciation for material culture applies to the other craft departments. As Andy put it, “We’re making items that have a story to tell, that we can be proud of and that link to the college values.”

With students off campus (there would ordinarily be about 20 of them helping), Andy is running the shop’s production with his shop assistant, Natalie Brown, who gained her woodworking skills during a residency in art at the University of Iowa. 

Andy Glenn

Andy joined the staff in 2017, when he was hired as head of wood craft. He and his family had been living in Rockport, Maine, where he worked as a woodworker after teaching and working in other capacities at North Bennet Street School.

Woodworking has always been an integral part of his life. Both of his grandfathers had wood shops; one worked on a 150-acre farm outside Ashland, Ohio, while the other, who lived in Ashland and worked as the town milkman, had a small basement shop where Andy spent a lot of time making things.

Andy graduated with a degree in business economics from the College of Wooster, Ohio. In 2004, straight after college, he and his wife, Sarah, got married. They moved to Cambridge, Mass., so Sarah could pursue a master’s degree at the Longy School of Music. Andy found work as business director for a school but realized the job involved too much administration for his liking. “I was chasing numbers all day,” he laughs, recalling himself thinking “’Look at my hands. There are no callouses anymore!’ In a weird way I recognized I just wanted to work with my hands.”

North Bennet Street School was two miles from where they lived; he took some classes, then went through the cabinetmaking and furniture program from 2006 to 2008. While he was a student, he also did a significant amount of teaching, worked as caretaker for the building and helped create the curriculum for (in addition to teaching in) a middle school program that was a partnership between NBSS and local public schools.

Despite all of this extracurricular work, he had to take on some debt. He found himself graduating into the Great Recession, which was daunting, but says “I was still excited. Still am. Which has served me well as a woodworker.”

Sarah graduated with a degree in violin performance, then went on to work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra as assistant manager of Education and Community Engagement.

Meanwhile, Andy had become friends with Freddy Roman as a student at NBSS. When Freddy left his part-time employment with Phil Lowe at the Furniture Institute of Massachusetts, Andy took over his role.

His next job was back at NBSS. At that time, he says, the school “was in an old structure, three buildings cobbled together to make one. I was on site for troubleshooting and routine (and after-hours) care. There were annual issues with fires in the sewer.” Having someone on site was critical. He also did such mundane jobs as taking out the trash and says “I loved every moment of it…. The school moved around the time I left, though it only moved a few blocks within the North End neighborhood of Boston. The new school building was renovated and outfitted to house the growing school.”

Andy and Sarah had a daughter, then a son. As the school was getting ready to move to a new location, Andy moved on to a position with a shipyard in Belfast, ME. “The dream was making wispy shavings on wooden boats. The reality was, I was a wearing a Tyvek suit grinding fiberglass. It was the job. In a weird way, I enjoyed it, but I only enjoyed it because I left it. Those people put in hard days and they love boats. Boats are something in your blood. They would come to work on these boats and ships, talk boats at lunch, and go home to work on their own boats.”

Next he got a job at a cabinet and furniture shop, Phi Home Designs in Rockport, ME, which made high-end residential cabinetry and furniture commissions. Andy did both. “That was a great position and a great education.” After leaving that job, he started doing his own work, piecing his income together from multiple sources, including commissions outsourced by other shops. He also taught at NBSS one week a month. “That was going well. I was working hard. But it wasn’t working for our family for me to be gone a week per month. Sarah was at home with the kids in midwinter. My travel and unpredictable schedule put too much stress on our young family.” They were open to something different.

Had they stayed in Maine, Andy would have had to get some kind of more stable employment with benefits, almost certainly not in woodworking. “I love woodworking,” he explains. “But it’s definitely secondary to family. I was really excited and grateful when the job opening came up in Berea.” He started the job in the summer of 2017.

“The students here are wonderful,” he says. “There’s very little entitlement. The students are grateful for the opportunity. They’re thankful to be at the college. Most of the students who work in the shop — you never know how they’ll use these skills going forward.”

Andy wrote to me separately that when it’s safe to resume classes at Pine Croft, Kelly Mehler will return to teach (and just generally be around the place) as often as he likes. Andy, too, will be teaching a number of courses. He asked me to point out that in choosing visiting instructors who are deep in knowledge, skills and expertise within the field of craft woodworking, he and his colleagues bore in mind the interracial and coeducational ideals and commitments of Berea College. “Our goal is to put together a roster that is representative of the woodworking community,” he wrote. “Much like Kelly created, my hope is that the school is a welcoming and special place for people to gather to learn woodworking.”

“I’m proud of the schedule and of our visiting instructors for the first season,” he added. “I’m certain the strength of the visiting staff came together because of the school environment and community that Kelly and Teri created. Peter Galbert and you [i.e., the author of this post] had taught at the school before. Megan Fitzpatrick cut her first dovetails with Kelly at the school. [Megan clarified that they were her first dovetails cut entirely by hand and noted that she has visited the school on multiple locations and loves the place.] I am grateful that Michael Puryear, Cathryn Peters and Brendan Gaffney were open to joining us for our first year.”

— Nancy Hiller, author of Kitchen Think, English Arts & Crafts Furniture and Making Things Work