Category: Profiles

Considering how wistfully many adults talk about youth, you’d think it really was carefree.

Was your youth carefree? Mine wasn’t. Aside from the usual complement of jobs, household chores and emotional Sturm und Drang, I was beset by concern about ecological devastation from the age of about 8, and about war and violence of all kinds. How can your heart not be broken by news of people being killed at a wedding or while having a pint at the pub, or wild animals dying in a human-caused conflagration?

Beyond this, the clear horizon of seemingly endless possibilities that causes so many adults to wax nostalgic about youth felt more like a burden to me. How should I plot my course when I had no idea what I “wanted” to do? What would be an ethical and meaningful way to make a living? As I went from one job to another, I quickly got a feel for the work that didn’t suit me. But it was far more difficult to imagine a line of work I might be capable of pursuing over the long term that would give me a sense of contributing, somehow – and one that wouldn’t quickly become depressingly routine.

A recent conversation with a young furniture designer-maker in England revived these memories and reminded me how glad I am to be (gulp) 61. Harriet (“Hattie”) Speed contacted me after she read Making Things Work – she wanted to interview me in connection with her project This Girl Makes. I looked up the website; it was clearly a worthwhile endeavor with which I’d be glad to help out. But when she sent a list of questions, each carefully related to an excerpt from the book, I was blown away by her thoughtfulness and how keenly the book had resonated with her. For example:

“Did you go through the mid-twenties crisis (as I am experiencing)? E.g. doubting yourself and your chosen career, questioning if you are ‘enough,’ losing motivation, falling out of love with making, feeling disenamoured with the ‘scene’/the ‘industry’?”

Excerpt from Making Things Work: With this change came a creeping return of the perfectionism I’d cultivated during my City & Guilds training. “Is this good enough?” I’d asked Mr. Williams in those days, handing him my latest effort at a dovetail or miter. In his soft Welsh accent he always threw the question back to me: “Do you consider it good enough? If you need to ask the question, you most likely know the answer.”

And

Perhaps you were expecting something technical: “Invest in a SawStop” or “Tails before pins.” With me, it’s always more existential.

I couldn’t help thinking this person would make a great career counselor (or shrink). And I was intrigued by what she’d revealed about her situation. As someone who gets her share of correspondence from woodworkers of all ages asking for my thoughts about going into furniture making as a livelihood, I sometimes feel like a therapist saying it’s OK – and in many cases, better – to save woodworking for your spare time. Fortunately, Christopher Schwarz agreed that as a thoughtful young person with formal training and an impressive list of awards, who is finding her way in the world as a woodworker, Hattie would make a good profile for this series.

Hattie was born in Hexham, Northumberland, a town Wikipedia describes as dominated by Hexham Abbey, a Gothic confection constructed in the 12^th century. The youngest of three sisters, she came along in 1995. For her A-level studies (the rough equivalent of junior and senior years in high school in the States) at Hexham High School, she did Product Design. Her first project was a light; the second, a chair. It was the chair that hooked her. She wanted to make furniture.

She started working toward this goal with an Art Foundation Diploma at Newcastle College, specializing in 3-D design. Next she considered a cabinetmaking apprenticeship with Robinson-Gay Fine Fine Furniture, but the principal, Stephen Robinson-Gay, told her to further her design education, specifically at Rycotewood Furniture College, in central Oxford.

She took his suggestion and went through a three-year bachelor’s of arts training in furniture design and making. To cover the course fees (each year of tuition at Rycotewood cost her £6,000-£7,000), she got a student loan. Hattie was one of three women in her year, some of them mature students (i.e., older than the typical students, who were recent high school grads or in their early to mid 20s). “I think that’s why it was such a positive experience,” she remarks; “there was such a mix of ages and backgrounds.” She learned as much from her peers as from the tutors.

She describes the training as “very traditional.” Hattie was particularly influenced by tutor Dr. Lynn Jones, who’s best known as the designer of a chair for breastfeeding women. “Her approach is so specific to each person she works with, she really listens and tries to understand who you are and what you are about,” she says of Dr. Jones. “She would often give me advice on projects I was doing alongside my studies, which meant her guidance was really holistic and I was able to benefit from resources outside of the college. It was also one of the first times I had met another woman in furniture, who shared my aesthetic style and love of resourcefulness! I guess we just clicked. She is now a very good friend. I must say though that all the staff at Rycotewood were VERY good and very committed to my learning – [it’s] worth mentioning Joseph Bray, the course leader; John Barns, the machine-training tutor/jig maker extraordinaire; and Drew Smith, CAD and design tutor.” 

The training was also quite competitive. “I felt I really had something to prove,” she says. “College taught me resilience, as I hadn’t done furniture making before,” she wrote for a testimonial on the Rycotewood website. “I kept trying, and eventually got up to a good standard. The tutors and staff are really amazing.” She spent the summer holidays following her first year at Rycotewood gaining work experience at Robinson-Gay, and told Stephen that he had changed her life.

The training at Rycotewood focused on hand tools to start, after which students added small equipment such as biscuit joiners. Following this basic training in techniques, they moved on to projects that involved designing and building to briefs. Her projects included bedside cabinets, a pair of reading stools called “HINNY” and “Corkey’s Cabinet,” her final design-build project, which she partnered with a related 5,000-word dissertation.

“Corkey’s Cabinet” explored how craft can help those who have been bereaved, a subject with which Hattie has personal experience, having lost her father when she was just 14. She designed and built a collector’s cabinet for keeping mementos of a loved one, the whole thing constituting a kind of therapy. “It ended up winning quite a few rewards,” she says, adding modestly, “so that was quite good.” Quite good, indeed. Rycotewood has its own annual award for graduating students; she won best in show. She also won best in show for the Young Furniture Makers Award that year. Following these exhibitions, she showed the piece as part of a show of furniture and artworks in wood at Messums Gallery, a contemporary arts center housed in a jaw-droppingly lovely 13^th-century tithe barn and adjacent dairy barn in the rolling hills of Wiltshire.

After this series of high-profile exhibitions, the prize-winning collector’s cabinet currently lives in her room, where the frame serves as a clothes horse and the top stores makeup.

Hattie lives in a shared house in Oxford with three others. In a few weeks she’ll be moving to a larger house with 10 occupants that she calls “a sort of art commune-type thing. I met the girl that set it up when we started a punk band that ended up being quite short-lived, but I went on to meet other people in their community.” When a room became available, Hattie jumped at the chance to be part of the household.

For now, she has two part-time jobs. One will be familiar to many graduates of furniture making courses: on Saturdays she teaches furniture design and making to young people at her former college, Rycotewood. Her other job is less typical: three days a week, she does therapeutic woodworking with patients at a neuro-rehab center that’s part of the National Health Service. She’s typically working with in-patients who have suffered strokes or traumatic brain injuries, as well as working with out-patients who experience other neurological conditions, such as MS. “There is a real mix; some patients are in wheelchairs and have good cognitive function, whereas others may have good limb function, but might struggle to communicate or have difficulties with vision or spatial awareness.” The workshop is in the ward; she collects the patients from their rooms and brings them to the workspace. They have a few set projects – a bird box, for example, a trinket box and a picture frame – and are encouraged to be creative in how they personalize them. Those who wish to customize their work are free to do so. They use a hand-powered miter saw for the cutting; the frame ensures it’s well within the capabilities of even those in lower-functioning cognitive states. “It’s pretty impressive what you can achieve,” Hattie remarks. “I find it really interesting as a designer-maker. You’d think it would be repetitive, but each person’s different, and the way you go about doing things is different for every person. It’s a form of therapy, so you get to learn about [them] and talk with them. It’s really social.”

But let’s go back a bit. After graduating from Rycotewood in 2018, Hattie took a job as a design engineer at Ercol, one of England’s best-known furniture manufacturers, which has been around since the 1940s and is still a major provider of home furnishings today. Ercol is a big supporter of Rycotewood; they do a lot of live projects, which says something about the company’s interest in staying relevant as tastes and ideas about furniture change. The chairman and head of design were at Hattie’s graduating show; she caught their eye because she won three awards. (It’s hard not to make an impression when you keep being called up to the stage.) When she saw a job opening in the design team, she applied, a move for which she credits a furniture designer friend, Alys Bryan, whom Hattie met during her first year at university; Alys, too, was a student of Dr. Jones.

By way of illustrating the gulf between what many imagine the job entailed and its reality, she offers the following: “’Oh, you’re a designer!’” friends would say. “No, actually, I’m a design engineer,” she’d reply; “I’m looking at what kind of screws we’re going to need.” As middle-person between the designer and the production team, she prepared technical drawings and did modeling on CAD, helped with bills of materials and sent them to the purchasing department. If the company was putting on an exhibition, she might design stands for the pieces, or help lay the show out.

“I definitely felt like, reading the job description, I could do that role,” Hattie reflects. “I went into it knowing I was going to learn a lot, but it was out of my comfort zone and what I would expect of myself. The skill set I thought I had – it was going to teach me the skills I didn’t have.”

As she settled into the job, the compartmentalization of the industrial work context chafed. “I like the holistic approach of doing every single part of the process and seeing it from start to finish. Although you did get to see the furniture being made, you weren’t involved in the making.” She’d spent three years in college making every day, always feeling she had something to prove. “When you’re a woman, people think you’re going to be a designer. So I worked really hard at learning to make.” And now she was in a job where several layers of intermediaries stood between her and the making.

On the other hand, she says, “they were really supportive in giving me opportunities and supporting projects I was doing outside of my job.” For instance, when she had an exhibition, they paid for printing for the exhibition, including postcards and artwork. They provided sponsorship so she could participate in the Young Professional Industry Experience, a three-week tour around furniture factories and showrooms, most of them larger operations but some smaller shops with 10 or so people on the shop floor. When a Design Technology teacher from Didcot Girls’ School approached her to ask whether she would run a workshop with her students, Ercol allowed her to do it on company time and provided two members of staff, as well as materials (“we used their waste components,” says Hattie – and what better use to make of waste than teaching people to build things?) to run the project. “That was probably the best thing I did while I was at Ercol. It made me realize that I enjoy being in a learning environment and working with people to create their own designs. Because the school was same-sex, we were running the workshop for approx 15 GCSE students (ages 14 and 15). Seeing that many girls in the workshop cracking on with the design-and-make project we had set was so exciting! It was a stark contrast to the factory floor.”

Feeling a bit of burn out, Hattie took four months out to reset. “I had no other job lined up. But a friend, who I studied at Rycotewood with, told me he was planning on leaving his job (the NHS role) to go travelling, which just so happened to be around the time I was thinking of leaving Ercol. I had already heard of the hospital’s workshop when the workshop manager had visited Rycotewood in my second year. And I had been in contact with him when I was doing my research into craft and bereavement, as I referenced a study the hospital carried out with its patients in my final essay. Whilst waiting to hear about the NHS role, I also contacted Rycotewood and asked if they had any work suitable for me, which resulted in the Saturday Club role.”

Lockdown

The lockdown proved a time for Hattie to do a lot of thinking and working through emotional stuff. Her job with the NHS has continued – she wears full PPE: mask, goggles, apron, gloves. But there has been no teaching at Rycotewood since the lockdown began. (She points out that those Saturday classes wouldn’t have been happening during the summer anyway.) At this point, she hopes to apply for a full-time role at the NHS and teach evening classes at Rycotewood on the side. To get there, she needs a teaching qualification. So she decided to do a post-graduate certificate of education through the City of Oxford College, where Rycotewood is based. She’ll be studying part-time over the next two years, while keeping her current jobs.

Taking on the bigger picture: This Girl Makes

Hattie started This Girl Makes in 2016, during the second year of her degree. She’d visited the London Design Fair at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane and spoken with the women makers; all agreed there should be a blog promoting women in craft. “You hear about all these men and you can reel off the names,” she says. “But not women. I did a lot of it for my own personal interest because I wanted to find other women who were interested in what I was interested in.”

She decided to put on workshops that would encourage women to get involved. Lacking her own workshop, she couldn’t have people come to her, so she went to them, approaching galleries and museums, community spaces, with proposals to engage members of the public. To save time during the events themselves, she put together kits of parts in her room in the shared house. The first project was a three-legged milking stool; the second, a toolbox made of plywood. In a two-hour session, participants would assemble these kits, as an introduction to the satisfactions of building something useful and practical for themselves.

It’s important to Hattie that the events be inclusive and accessible. For some of these events, she has managed to obtain funding, which allows low-income people to participate. Others are ticketed. At this point she’s done more than 20. They’ve gone really well, she says; she often fills every spot available. “There are a lot of schools where you can learn to make high-end furniture [that] cost thousands of pounds,” she notes. In contrast, these two-hour courses are accessible to kids and complete beginners. “There’s definitely a demand for it. I want to keep doing it as a side thing.”

Parents tell her schools don’t offer this kind of teaching any more. Their workshops aren’t well resourced, or they’ve been entirely shut down. There’s a lack of teachers who can teach these skills; everything has shifted to digital. “Everyone at school will learn to use a laser cutter, but won’t necessarily learn to sharpen a chisel or set a plane.”

Reflecting on where she stands at this moment, Hattie is keenly aware that she’s on a road less traveled. “At formal furniture training colleges you’re going to learn to make fine furniture so you can get a job making furniture for the 0.1%. It’s unlikely this furniture will ever be used. It’s superficial and made for people to show off. But there’s a market for that. There’s [also] a reduced middle class, and therefore market, for bespoke, handmade furniture. Some people are totally fine with that, because they just want to make what they want to make and they don’t question the ethics. But that didn’t sit comfortably with me.”

She was training to be part of that scene, but she didn’t want to be part of it. She thought that working at Ercol, which makes well-designed furniture that is more affordable, more vernacular and functional, would align better with her values. But various aspects of that work jangled, too.

She’s quick to acknowledge that she’s pursuing a different path from many furniture design students. “Having studied on a bespoke furniture making course, you don’t do design for industry!” There are different standards and materials – the whole perspective is far more commercial. Having been trained to use hand tools, she was now designing for CNC production. It was also her first experience in a corporate environment. “Because my parents are both self-employed, it was my first experience of being in a pecking order. Also, the office environment – that was totally not me. So that was a bit of an education. A lot of positives came out of it, but it was a very tough year.”

A few weeks ago, Hattie and her family observed the 10th anniversary of her dad’s death. “When I had my exhibition last year…the last line of my thank you speech was ‘thanks mum and dad, for bringing me into the world.’” She’s grateful for opportunities her parents have given her. “My mum is very tough-love. In her not being a typical mum she’s made me more independent… It’s a silver lining of something that could be viewed as more negative.” She describes her dad, a quantity surveyor who worked with architects to calculate materials needed for given jobs, as “a man of real integrity. Very honest. He had a very big heart. Even in business, he had really good relationships with people he worked with. He had his own business, working in construction…but approached everything with a real sense of humor and playfulness and would always find ways of incorporating creativity into his days. I definitely wouldn’t have achieved as much as I have had he not been my dad, and had he not died. If you lose a parent when you’re younger you grow up quite quickly, and you also learn the value of life.”

I, for one, will be watching with interest where Hattie goes.

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

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