Andy Glenn is the author of the newly released “Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Ladderback Chairmaker.” He found more than 20 of them and earned their trust then, beautifully and authentically through words and photos, told the stories of their lives and their work, which has been handed down through generations for more than 200 years.
Andy grew up among fields of corn and soybeans on patchworked land so fertile that in 1808 Ohioans named it Richland County. His grandfather George Fike lived in an old Victorian farmhouse on about 150 acres in nearby Ashland Twp., Ohio, and had a wood and metal fabrication shop, where he worked on anything needed for the house and farm. Andy’s grandfather Lawrence Glenn was the town milkman in Ashland County, Ohio. In his basement shop he would turn old milk crates into boxes and small gifts for family.
Andy’s family – parents, both teachers, and a younger sister and brother – lived on 11 acres. His mother had horses. Each year his father would raise six to 10 head of black Angus beef for neighbors or community members who put in an order. Andy participated in 4-H and had sheep. They had dogs.
“It was just a wonderful time,” Andy says.
Although Andy fed animals in the morning and evening, and helped care for the farm, he says he grew up surrounded by Amish and Mennonite families with children that “could run laps around me with their knowledge of things.”
Andy loved sports. He played baseball, soccer and basketball, and his parents encouraged it all, from a young age through high school.
“They’d sign me up for the local travel teams and we’d travel around the state and out of state. Now that I’m a parent, I realize how committed they were to providing opportunities.”
In the summers Andy worked as an extra set of hands for his best friend, Troy’s dad, Phil Perry, who ran a carpentry crew. Andy and Troy would spend many late nights in Phil’s basement shop, building things.
“And if we had questions, Phil would come down and give us some guidance,” Andy says. “Show us how to run a router, safe ways to run a table saw.”
Andy attended Walsh University then transferred to The College of Wooster his sophomore year as a business economics major. He also helped coach his high school’s freshman boys’ basketball team, not minding the hour drive each way. He loved his college experience.
“College always seemed like it was going to be what I did,” Andy says. “My parents were the first to go to college and they really encouraged me to go to college. I suppose I was a bit short-sighted – I knew I was going to go to college but I didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen after that.”
From Business to Building
Shortly after college graduation, Andy married his high school sweetheart, Sarah. His wedding gift to Sarah was a dining table, built in Phil’s shop. Together they moved to Boston, where Sarah, a classical violinist, attended graduate school at the Longy School of Music, just north of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Andy took a job as the business director of a small Christian high school, where he also helped with the basketball teams and coached JV soccer – a team made up of players who were fulfilling the school’s sports requirement, which made the whole experience fun but also absurd at times, Andy says, laughing.
“I thought the job was perfect,” he says. “It married my interests, my degree and my faith. I thought it would be a perfect job. And it was a nice job. But after a short time there I thought, I’m not in the right setting.”
Andy and Sarah lived in a small apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Andy remembers one day coming home and showing Sarah his hands. They were smooth – not a single callus in sight.
“I just kind of realized I was chasing numbers all day and then I would never catch them and then we’d come back the next day and chase them again. And I was just kind of out of place.”
Desiring change, Andy started taking classes at the nearby North Bennet Street School (NBSS).
“I loved every moment of it,” he says. “Just to be surrounded by all these people who are passionate about furniture and excited about it in much the same way. It was a wonderful two years.”
Andy particularly loved the instructors, including Dan Faia, still a close friend and mentor, and Alex Krutsky, who recently passed away.
“Alex was just the most charming man and he had a real ornery sense of humor,” Andy says. “One day I came in first thing and I was doing a glue-up. I had clamps everywhere. I was sweating and moving and it wasn’t going well and I was getting anxious. And Alex, he came up the stairs in the bench room and came over the way he did and had this little smile on his face. And he just goes, ‘The reason we use clamps is so we don’t have to hold the wood together with our hands while the glue dries.’ It was a joke, but it was just perfect in the moment because I was failing miserably and he wasn’t there to help, but to add a little joke. And he would have helped me if I needed it. Now, at least once or twice a week, I pick up a clamp and smile about Alex.”
After graduating from NBSS in 2008, Andy found work as shop help at Phil Lowe’s school, the Furniture Institute of Massachusetts.
Six months later, a live-in caretaker position opened up at NBSS. Andy and Sarah moved into a little, quirky, third- and fourth-floor apartment inside the school, and Andy served as caretaker for five years.
“Everything about it was fun,” he says.
For five years Andy managed the old buildings, attending to triggered motion sensors, water main breaks and sewer fires. A job perk was using open space as he pleased, as long as he remained somewhat unseen. This provided him shop space to build. During this time Andy also taught some classes at NBSS and worked part-time job at a furniture repair shop called Second Life in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
During this time Sarah was working for the Boston Symphony’s education department. Their daughter, Ruby, was born in 2011. Ruby’s nursery was a large closet (they previously used it as an office) in their NBSS apartment. Fourteen months later their son, Francis, was born. They loved Boston but they always knew they’d eventually leave. With two kids, they decided it was time.
To Maine, Kentucky & Back Again
They moved to Maine, a place they always hoped to call home, and Andy spent time dropping off résumés at various shops. He found work at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast.
“It was a very fun job but it was a J-O-B, right from the beginning, because it was all new to me,” Andy says. “People think of wispy shavings on wooden boats but it was really like grinding fiberglass off tugboat refits. It was a dirty job, fun, but dirty.”
Several months later a custom commercial cabinetry shop (Phi Home Designs – the name has since changed, now Hay Runner) called him with an opening. He was the go-to furniture guy, working on projects that passed his bench. When there was no furniture work to be done he’d help out the cabinet crew, which, he says, was enjoyable and eye-opening – the materials, approach and methods were all different. He stayed on for about three and a half years.
In 2017, a position opened up in Berea College Student Craft’s woodcraft program, and Andy and Sarah thought it might be nice to live closer to family for a bit. Andy applied, was accepted, and they moved to Berea, Kentucky.
“The college was a totally new experience for me,” Andy says. “Being a woodworker in academia, that made my head spin for a little while. But the actual job was great.”
As the Director of Woodcraft, he worked with students all day, teaching them how to make the college’s craft and furniture items.
“Each year, a number of people came into the woodshop who had never woodworked before and I got to guide them through their first woodworking experiences,” he says. “And a number of them, you could just see it – they loved the shop and they’d come in on their off hours and you could just see that build and grow.”
Former students will reach out to him from time to time, with photos of walking sticks they recently made or news of how their career in woodworking, born in Berea, is going.
During this time Andy was also tapped to help get The Woodworking School at Pine Croft, formerly the Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, owned by Kelly and Teri Mehler, back up and running.
“Kelly and Teri were very kind to our family from the moment we moved into town,” Andy says. “Kelly was working with the college with the possibility of selling the school, selling his property – I just kind of knew of it. And then the college did purchase the Mehler’s place, and as we were getting the school started up again, that’s where my role came into play.”
But as much as Andy was enjoying his work, Kentucky didn’t feel like home. He, Sarah and the kids all missed Maine. He remembers one day he and Sarah were driving around Berea, searching the radio.
“After scanning all the stations Sarah said, ‘I wished we lived somewhere that had a classical station.’ That resonated with me,” Andy says. “Our local stations played mountain bluegrass – which is beautiful – but no classical, and in that moment it felt like we were misfits for the place.”
So in 2021, they began looking for a new place to settle. The housing market at the time felt impossible. But then, serendipity: With a better understanding of what Andy and Sarah were looking for, their Realtor wrote and said her parents’ house, which wasn’t on the market yet, seemed like a good fit. Andy and Francis took a road trip to Waldoboro, Maine, and saw that it was a perfect fit.
“It’s an old cape, 1859, and there are projects, nonstop projects on this place, which is why it was in our price range and why we could get into it,” Andy says. “And just the amazing providential piece of it was that he had built this shop space in 2013. He was a boatbuilder, so he had a few boats in there, but it was a board-and-batten shell. And I’ve been able to keep building it out ever since I got into it.”
Today the kids are enrolled in a small school. Sarah, a creative like Andy, works a couple of different jobs, and Andy builds chairs, makes custom furniture, sells chair kits and teaches. It works.
Until recently, Andy would put time into “Backwoods Chairmakers” in the morning, “the best time to write,” he says. “It’s just been in the last few months that that hasn’t been on the front of my mind and the back of mind at all times.”
He’s in the shop for as many hours as he can be, at least until mid-afternoon, depending on the day. The flexibility is a gift, allowing Andy to end his workday as late as 6:30 p.m. or as early as 2:30 p.m., to pick up the kids from school and take them to various activities when needed. Saturdays are typically a half day of work.
“The rhythm and the way it’s going right now works for us,” he says.
Andy also enjoys being on the road and teaching.
“I get a lot of joy from teaching in the sense that there is a connection when working with people who have their own goals, who are getting started in the craft or who are excited about a new project or skill,” he says. “I get to participate in that experience.”
On Building a Book
For about a year and a half Andy traveled to chairmakers’ homes. He’d visit, take notes, with permission record interviews, then come back home and write as much as he could about the visit and the experience.
“I was obviously and clearly an outsider visiting these chairmakers in Appalachia,” he says. “I kind of knew that right from the beginning. What I didn’t know was that Lost Art Press and this book idea really carried no weight. The chairmakers were intrigued by it, but it was fairly abstract.”
He learned some things along the way, including the necessity of a doorstep explanation versus a phone call from states away.
“The first couple of chairmaking visits I’d get all my gear out, right as I was getting out of the car,” he says. “That was the wrong approach because we didn’t have any rapport. Slowly I learned I needed to get out and we needed to just sit and talk for a while. And then the chairmaker could size me up and size up the project and decide if and how they wanted to contribute. And from there we could get going.”
He wanted the chairmakers to know that he wasn’t writing a quick one-off story with a photograph attached. Rather, he was going to be in touch again to make sure he got things right, to make sure he was telling the story fully and correctly.
“Usually, as we would sit and talk at the beginning, we’d reach a point where the chairmaker would say something along the lines of, ‘Well, we better get going if we’re going to do this.’ And that was my signal that it was time to work,” he says.
At first Andy had a collection of essays that didn’t relate. But once the traveling came to an end he was able to look at the essays as a whole and find commonalities, forming the book’s structure.
He also noted different themes: design, family, contemporary building methods, marketing.
“Each maker kind of had these threads that they emphasized,” he says.
Once he identified them, Andy would tug on those threads during the writing process, and call each chairmaker to follow up with questions along those lines.
He also looked for repetition. Every chairmaker mentioned dry rungs and wet posts, and as such, Andy had written about dry rungs and wet posts a dozen times. So he began paring what had already been said to make the stories more interesting.
Turning in the manuscript and photographs to Lost Art Press prompted a bit of withdrawal.
“That book was with me daily for years, and now it doesn’t need me anymore,” Andy says. “But I loved the travel piece. The appreciation for those chairs took me places that I never would have traveled to without this project. It took me into communities and into back lanes and to meet people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. So there was just always an excitement around it, around travel and meeting other people. And it always felt like we had chairs as our commonality and we’d always come back to an appreciation of these chairs. That gave me a great place to start from as they shared their messages for making.”
A New Way of Thinking about the Intersection of Work & Life
Although the book is complete, it’s still very much present in Andy’s daily life.
“I know it’s affected my work,” he says. “I’m by no means an Appalachian chairmaker but I can see the influence. I’ve been thinking about this every day for quite a while now. So it can’t help but permeate some of the work I’m doing. I loved meeting these people who made chairmaking, woodworking craft, furniture making, a part of their life. And it really changed how I quantify work.”
Andy used to think of work as part-time, full-time, 40 hours a week.
“Their lives had none of those parameters around it,” he says. “For a number of them, there were times to make chairs and then there were times when other things were more pressing. And that might mean because the shop is cold in the winter and so winters are for other things and recharging. And in the spring you make chairs. Or it gets really hot and so the summer is for gardening and other work and in the cooler periods you get into the chairs. So I stopped considering it as part-time, full-time, and I just started looking at it more as a part of life.”
In addition to chairmaking, custom furniture builds and teaching, Andy reads a lot. He enjoys photography. He deeply appreciates the wildness, quietness and ruralness of Maine. He appreciates long nights by the woodstove.
“Our kids are at an age where they’re quite active and we’re about with them,” he says. “On Wednesdays I’m a goalie for a co-ed soccer team. Everyone here is like, ‘Oh, hockey!’ And I’m like, ‘No, soccer,’” he laughs.
He also finds that time spent in his shop and teaching complement each other wonderfully.
“I do love working in the shop by myself,” he says. “But after a stretch of that I want to teach. I want to be around other energy, other ideas. I enjoy that I get to teach and share and then come back to the shop and recharge, explore some new ideas and then go back out and teach again.”
For the first time Andy plans on teaching some classes in his shop, this spring. The 40′ x 30′ building has two floors. Currently the second floor is being used for storage as he outfits the first. He’s built walls, installed lighting and electricity, and he’s starting to get benches and machines, things he’s been acquiring since moving back to Maine, in place. Although he’s always had a bench, even in his apartments, he’s been spoiled, he says, due to the access he’s had to the shops everywhere he’s worked.
“I have more ideas than money,” he says, laughing. “I know, that’s everyone. I see how this will all come together in the end. I just keep working on it step by step.”
As of this writing Andy’s working on a custom timber-frame style bed out of large beams of red oak. And he’s working on a chair – he’s always working on a chair, either for himself or someone else.
“I really just love the process of making a chair,” he says. “Everything about it from the idea to the physical process of handling the materials, splitting it out, shaving them if I’m making a greenwood chair, all the way to putting the finish on and seeing how that chair comes together at the very end. I just really enjoy making, I think.”
Andy says he’s always been drawn to something chairmaker Curtis Buchanan said about 15 years ago.
“He just described his work and how family is close by and important to him, and how his shop is behind his house and how everything is kind of linked together and intertwined, and I found that appealing,” Andy says. “I enjoy having the shop behind the house and being able to work from home. Other things are more important but the shop is right here for work where it fits. And sometimes that’s more hours out here, sometimes it’s less. It’s just here as it needs to be.”
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
