The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). Please excuse the choices of pronouns. We are all products of our time, and Charles Hayward (born in 1898) was no exception. Every time we re-read one of these essays, we’re struck by how so much of it still resonates today. May our shared interests in the craft continue to be the “best kind of aid to living.”
So often it would seem that the wrong kind of memories attach themselves to Christmas. For some people there is a convention of sadness. Things are not what they used to be. Sons and daughters have married and gone their way and left the home hearth desolate. Death has made gaps in the family circle, beloved friends are with us no more, and the tide of mournful reminiscence flows on. But so does the ever-recurring pattern of life. We cannot halt the process. Only the intensely selfish and possessive would even wish to do so.
But surely we can persuade ourselves to an acceptance of the passage of time. The sad things and the bitter things lose their keen edge with the years, but, like the sundial which tells only the sunny hours, we can cherish the happy memories and rejoice in them as being something truly precious of our own.
Once when I was on a train journey, a small boy and his mother came tumbling breathlessly into the compartment, waved off by a happy throng of youngsters. As the train drew out of the station the boy sat back silently, little smiles chasing one another across his face. His mother looked down. “Tired?”
He shook his head and heaved a sign of contentment. “No. I was just thinking. I’ve had such a perfect day.”
Often I thought of him while the war was on, for that time he would have been old enough to fight. Did the memory of his perfect day spent in an English garden amid the happy laughter of his friends come back to him then? I have always felt sure that it did.
And then there are the absurd things in our lives which unite us to “the inextinguishable laughter of the gods.” Once when I was walking behind a friend in a narrow country lane, my foot slipped and I went headlong into a deep ditch. The side was almost perpendicular and for the life of me I could not manoeuvre myself the right way up again. My friend, meanwhile, who had been talking to me over his shoulder, struck by the sudden silence, looked round and found to his amazement I had completely vanished. Looking up and down and round about he saw at last a pair of feet projecting from the ditch. The moment when his horrified face came peering over the top at me, then to all intents and purposes standing on my head, still remains one of the funniest moments of my life. Indeed, we were both so paralysed with laughter that rescue by means of his helping hand was a slow business.
It still remains a memory which can set me chuckling at any time—and, oh, life is so mercifully full of them, if we know how to enjoy them and make them truly our own.
Then there is the chronic idea of loneliness, which is becoming one of the great bugbears of our age. Unfortunately, it is real enough for a great many people. What always seems so unreal are the means taken to alleviate it. The Christmas parties, the communal get-togethers, television and the like, are panaceas which bring their moments of happiness, but they cannot provide any real cure for loneliness. As with so many other problems, only the person concerned can find the answer. A rejoicing spirit will rarely be a lonely spirit, for he or she will be able to enter with liveliness and interest into whatever part of the human scene their lot is thrown. Moreover, for anyone who has been able to develop some definite interest or practical skill, there is always too much to occupy him for the thought of loneliness to enter in. The important thing is to find an interest in life which accords with the needs of one’s own nature.
For the man who is essentially practical a handicraft is the answer, one in which he can turn any skill which he already possesses to better and finer use, right up to the point where his craftsmanship enters the realm of true art and becomes a source of increasing satisfaction.
And there is no reason to limit his interest to manual skill. There is a whole wide field of literature dealing with furniture making and its allied crafts and the social history behind them. In fact, there are all manner of related interests which can be pursued by anyone who is prepared to take sufficient time and trouble. To start with only a meagre equipment of knowledge is no handicap in these days of good libraries and easy accessibility of objects of superb craftsmanship in famous houses and museums. We can browse among them all and follow up any particular trails which most take our fancy.
Interests will open up as we go, leading to many a fascinating bypath which at the beginning could never have been foreseen. A man has to care sufficiently to make the initial start and to be sufficiently persistent till the thing grips him. After that he will insensibly acquire those inner resources of his own which, in the long run, are the best kind of aid to living.
Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement.To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books.
Send us your own ideas! Email kara@lostartpress.com. You can read more about the submission process here.
Today’s pick is courtesy of Craig Regan, which may be helpful during your next stick chairbuild. Thanks, Craig!
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Boring a compound mortise for a stretcher in a vertical leg is one of the more complex operations in stick chair building. I developed this shop-made, spring-loaded stretcher to assist in that process. It simulates the position of the finished stretcher and helps in the following ways.
1: It helps you lay out and fine-tune the correct position of the stretcher. This enables you to see how a stretcher will look before boring any mortises and makes sure you are aligned with the center of the leg.
2: Once the stretcher is in place, the steel ends can be pressed into the leg to establish an accurate center point for boring the leg.
3: It helps you measure the length of the stretcher. I use a “shoulder-to-shoulder” measurement then add the length of the tenons later. A pencil tick on the plastic spring housing records the length. A small spring clamp stabilizes the spring mechanism.
4: It’s also useful for prototyping new designs and helping you decide on the stretcher location.
Want to make one? You will need:
3/4” dowel (poplar wood is fine)
plastic toilet paper roller (you can find this at your local home center)
Kreg Pocket-Hole Jig pocket screw
J-B Weld quick-set epoxy
1/8” x 24 tpi steel rod
Instructions:
1: Disassemble the toilet paper roller by pulling it apart. Cut off the end cap on the narrow tube and insert a section of 3/4” dowel. Use a dab of J-B Weld expoxy to hold it permanently.
2: With the other 3/4” dowel, bore a 3/8”-flat bottom hole in to the dowel end. Insert the capped end of the larger tube and secure it with the Kreg screw and J-B epoxy. Note: You will need an extension bit to reach into the tube depth. Also, pre-drill a pilot hole 1/16” to prevent the dowel from splitting.
3: To size it, reassemble the spring housing with the spring compressed, and mark the unit plus or minus 1” smaller than the space between the chair legs.
4: Pre-drill the dowel ends and insert 1” sections of threaded rod. Grind a point on the rods.
One caveat is the limited length. The cost is about $5 a piece and assembly is quick, so making multiple custom sizes is no problem. You can also do a friction fit (no glue) with the dowel in the smaller tube. This makes swapping out different dowel lengths quick and easy.
Thanks for reading about my spring-loaded stretcher. I hope you find this useful.
Molly Gregory, 1940 or 1941. Courtesy of David Silver.
Mary “Molly” Gregory was a talented and determined woodworker who used her skills widely, from constructing farm structures, and renovating and building homes, to designing and building custom furniture that would eventually be displayed in museums.
She’s perhaps best known for her time at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts college founded by John Rice on a farm in rural North Carolina. Often touted as “a grand experiment,” Black Mountain College was rooted in progressive education philosophies and drew many well-known modernist artists. Students and faculty built much of the campus themselves, including buildings and furnishings.
In his book “The Farm at Black Mountain College,” David Silver describes Molly as his “personal MVP of BMC [Black Mountain College].” In his Spring 2010 essay in Northern Woodlands, Robert Kimber, who knew Molly personally, writes that he and his wife named their son, Gregory, after her. Molly continues to inform and inspire, as exemplified in Holly Gore’s recent doctoral dissertation featuring case studies of modernist woodworkers from the 1930s to 1970s, “where work is actually itself the medium,” including Molly.
In “Curator Conversations: Woodworking, Labor, and Modernism with Holly Gore,” Gore shares a picture of Molly in the woodworking shop that she ran, taught classes from and helped build at Black Mountain College. Community, Gore says, was at the heart of the curriculum. As was its experiment with democracy. Woodworking was a core activity that not only produced objects, but also citizens. Black Mountain College gave Molly access to leadership and treated her not as a consumer but as a citizen.
With thanks to Lost Art Press researcher extraordinaire Suzanne Ellison for the suggestion, here’s Molly’s story.
Born in 1914, Molly was raised on a farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. During the Depression, she attended the Beaver Country Day School, a progressive, all-girls’ high school founded in 1920. One of its founders, Mabel Warren Bradley, leaned heavily on John Dewey’s educational philosophy of learning by doing, a philosophy Molly also embraced.
“John Dewey was influential at Beaver, so I’d been ‘Deweyized’ from the beginning,” Molly said in a 1997 interview, part of “The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project Inc. Oral History Collection” from Appalachian State University.
In 1932, Molly was one of 87 women to enroll in the inaugural class at Bennington College, a liberal arts women’s college, where she studied sculpture. She graduated in 1936 and got a job teaching elementary-aged children at The Cambridge School of Weston.
“While hired to teach sculpture, Molly also taught ceramics, and life drawing, and oversaw athletics and directed the woodshop,” Silver wrote. “She particularly enjoyed her time with shop teacher Alfred Hulst, who helped Molly refine the woodworking and building skills she had learned on the family farm.”
Molly had several friends and acquaintances who had various connections to Black Mountain College. Molly’s Bennington roommate, Ruth Bailey, attended Black Mountain College after leaving Bennington. Harper’s Magazine published the story of Black Mountain College – “Education on a mountain” by Louis Adamic, which Molly read. Molly visited Black Mountain College several times. She liked its focus on community over self, and the students and faculty liked her. She was also ready for a change.
“It was clear that if I stayed in sculpture, I was going to be a teacher for the rest of my life because I wasn’t a good enough sculptor,” she said in her oral history.
Student Work Crew at Black Mountain College, from the Black Mountain College Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 3, February 1943. Photo courtesy of David Silver.
So in 1941, Molly drove her 1935 V-8 Ford to North Carolina and enrolled at Black Mountain College as an apprentice teacher and a student of Josef Albers. After one semester, she was both student and teacher, leading classes in woodworking and sculpture.
“Molly established regular shop hours six days a week during which any member of the community could learn woodworking skills and work on projects,” Silver wrote. “Most importantly, Molly transformed the woodshop from a space where somewhat random individual works were produced to an organized shop with a mission: to build much-needed items for Black Mountain College.”
On its website, Black Mountain College describes Molly as someone who quickly proved herself indispensable, “particularly during the war years when she led the work program and oversaw those aspects of campus life crucial to its survival. She took over the woodworking shop begun by Robert Bliss and oversaw the completion of the Studies Building. Nearly all of the furnishings and designs for the student studies, dormitories, and academic and agricultural buildings were created in the woodworking shop with instruction by Gregory.”
“Page-Gregory Tea Wagon,” designed by Don Page and Mary “Molly” Gregory (Photograph by Claude Stoller). North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Black Mountain College Research Project, Visual Materials, Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, North Carolina. Photo courtesy of David Silver.
Molly built a conference table for the faculty room in the Studies Building and helped make tables for the dining room. Also out of the shop came kitchen cupboards, drafting tables, bookshelves, carving benches and more.
“In November 1942, just over a year after Molly’s arrival, the woodshop was humming with do-it-yourself activity,” Silver writes.
Students were constructing their own benches for the weaving department and building milk racks for the kitchen, according to Silver. A professor used the shop to make a table and cabinets for his study.
Woodworking class with Molly Gregory. Mary “Molly” Gregory Photos and Prints, Black Mountain College Research Project, Visual Materials, Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, North Carolina. Courtesy of David Silver.
“With Molly at the helm, the woodshop trained a new generation of students how to hammer, saw, and drill – how to make things,” Silver wrote.
While working on the Studies Building, Molly took it upon herself to also fix up the few power tools they had.
“So, there was a buzz saw [circular saw], and there was a jointer, and there was a drill press and so on, but nobody had time to fix them up or get them going,” she said in her oral history. “I did that because I thought a buzz saw would be a help. It was terribly interesting because for me the idea of ripping boards by hand when you had a buzz saw was for the birds. But the North Carolinian carpenters thought nothing of ripping miles of boards, just by hand.”
The farm at Black Mountain College. Photo by Joseph Breitenbach. Photographic Collection, Black Mountain College Papers, Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, North Carolina. Photo courtesy of David Silver.
During the war, Molly was also instrumental in developing a farm at Black Mountain College, one that yielded enough produce to feed the entire community. One of the first things she did was create plans for a milking house. She designed and helped build new fences and multiple structures, including one to store farm machinery, a bullpen, a hog pen, a henhouse and a beef shed.
Mary “Molly” Gregory Photos and Prints, Black Mountain College Research Project, Visual Materials, Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, North Carolina. Photo courtesy of David Silver.
“Molly designed the hog house and built it entirely in the woodshop, constructing six-foot prefabricated sections, lugging the pieces to the farm, and assembling them in situ,” Silver wrote.
“As a Quaker Friend, Gregory’s influence can perhaps be found most readily in The Quiet House, a building designed and built with student Alex Reed in memory of Mark Dreier, the young son of BMC founders Ted and Bobbie Dreier, who died in a vehicle accident on campus,” according to Black Mountain College. “The benches of The Quiet House resonate with the Quaker influence and invite contemplation.”
“Mary ‘Molly’ Gregory, Spring 1942,” Photograph by Howard Dearstyne, Martin Duberman Collection, 1933 – 1980, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, North Carolina. Courtesy of David Silver.
In short time, Molly was wearing many hats. She was the supervisor of the woodshop. She was teaching full-time. She ran the farm books. And she was the farm manager.
“Truth be told, Molly was exhausted,” Silver wrote.
Molly left Black Mountain College in 1947 and moved to Woodstock, Vermont, where she ran a woodworking shop – Woodstock Enterprises, owned by a former Black Mountain College student, David Bailey – for six years.
Woodstock Enterprises focused on custom furniture and cabinetry, as well as remodeling and general construction projects.
In 1953, Molly decided to go out on her own. She founded her own woodworking shop, in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then in Lincoln, Massachusetts. For nearly 35 years, she designed furniture for homes and churches, did custom interior work, and renovated and built houses. She had several employees who worked for her.
In Lincoln, Molly lived in an apartment she built for herself, located inside a barn owned by friends, Kimber wrote. Her shop was located on the barn’s ground floor. She also had a Jersey cow, chickens and a dog named Griselda whom she called Grum.
“Although she had grown up on a farm and wound up running the farm at Black Mountain College, where she had gone to teach in 1941, she was, first and foremost, a woodworker, the very best of several first-rate ones it’s been my good luck to know,” Kimber wrote. “She could do it all. From designing and building a house to fine cabinetmaking to intricate carvings for a church altar. And along with everything she knew about woods and their properties and tools and their uses, she had an artist’s eye, which she had developed to a high level working with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Whatever she built, whether barn or sideboard, had clean, simple lines and seemed just made for whatever setting it was in.”
Kimber also noted her problem-solving ability.
“Once, when she’d been installing a set of classy and expensive kitchen counters and cabinets, a knot broke out of the middle of one of the counters,” he wrote. “What to do? She made an inlay in the shape of a leaping dolphin, converting a disaster into a beautiful decorative detail. ‘If you can’t hide it,’ she said, ‘feature it.’”
She also continued to teach on the side.
“I had a wonderful job at Concord Academy working with the students in carving,” she said in her oral history. “We built a chapel and carved the altar and made the steeple.”
Molly taught woodworking at Concord Academy from 1958 to 1972. Memorabilia, Memories, Memorials, published by Concord Academy in 2010, notes “Students under her direction carved the Corinthians panels mounted at the front of the Chapel, the altar, lectern, and music stands.”
She also taught at Shady Hill School and Belmont Day School.
At 85 years old, Molly could no longer live in the barn. She moved to The New England Friends Home in Hingham, Massachusetts, where she spent her time quilting and watercolor painting.
Although she was not allowed to have pets, Kimber writes, “She built a small-scale fire escape, not for herself but for her cat, Sophia, who used that unobtrusive structure to leave and enter Molly’s second-story room day or night, unseen by other residents or the staff. Sophia occasionally brought red squirrels along too, some alive, who would often find refuge in Molly’s closet.”
A few years before her death, a sideboard she made in the early 1960s was part of an exhibition called “The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940 to 1990” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (See the accompanying book by Edward S. Cooke, here.)
Describing the sideboard, Cooke writes, “Her small shop (which had a few male employees) produced furniture, including a large walnut sideboard in a distinctive mode that blends a variety of joinery and ornamental characteristics. Especially notable in the sideboard are the arched support at the base and the rhythmic drawer arrangement; a large cupboard for trays is also cleverly included at the back of the case.”
Molly died November 21, 2006, in Hingham, Massachusetts.
After her death, her work was featured in a 2014 exhibition called “Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design” at the Black Mountain College Museum
Her work has also been on display at the Asheville Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In this update to his 1978 classic, the original text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout this edition book, Drew has added text, which is in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.
In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.
The 1978 edition of “Country Woodcraft” inspired a generation of woodworkers to make spoons, bowls and other handy home implements. We hope that “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” continues to inspire another generation.
This is your chance to ask Chris about the “south mouth” on the Lincolnshire chair (shown above at left and back) – though that chair is the subject of the next Stick Chair Journal, which will be out early next year.
Our last 2025 Open Wire – your chance to post any and all woodworking questions and get answers from Chris, me and fellow readers – is this Saturday from around 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Eastern. (And this time, it’ll be mostly Chris during the day, as I’ll be teaching a Dutch tool chest class, and will chime in as time and necessity allows.
The Open Wire dates for 2026 are: February 28 April 18 June 20 August 8 October 19 December 12
