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Interviewing furniture maker Michael Puryear feels a bit like listening in on a geography or sociology class delivered by a laid-back professor with the mellow voice of Richie Havens and a warm, easy laugh. When asked where he grew up, Michael starts further back than most, with the culture of slavery in the southern states – specifically, Virginia, which was home to many of his forebears.

“Those families in the tidewater area did not grow cotton,” he begins, differentiating the area’s history from the widespread stereotype. Slavery existed, for sure, but in varied forms, each tied to a particular region and the agricultural products that would thrive there. The primary crop in tidewater states was tobacco, grown on smaller farms with fewer slaves, many of whom lived in the same house as their masters. Sea island slavery was another form, this one off the coast of Georgia and North Carolina and based on the cultivation of rice and indigo, which these slaves’ ancestors had grown in Africa. Sea island slaves lived in villages they organized themselves and spoke Gullah, the language of their African heritage. Their owners were generally absentee, living in Charleston and Savannah; while there were overseers, the slaves were “pretty much left on their own to do the work.” Finally, there was Antebellum slavery, focused on the growing of cotton in the hot, wet climate of more central southern states with well-drained soils.

Why start with slavery? As Michael says in a quote on the Smithsonian website, he wants “to acknowledge and honor the contributions of African American slaves to this country. Like my own ancestry this heritage began before the founding of the United States. African Americans have fought with honor and loyalty in every war of our nation. They have significantly contributed economically, socially, culturally and politically to American culture.”

From the South, we jumped far to the North, with more eye-opening history. Although Michael’s father’s side of the family has its North American roots in the tidewater area, his father was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Philadelphia. Michael explains the move. His paternal grandfather, Moses, was a Baptist minister in Africville, a major terminus of the Underground Railroad.

His paternal grandmother, Elma Clark, died as a consequence of giving birth to her second child, Ruth. Moses remarried and continued to live in Africville with his children; they were still living there on December 6, 1917, when a Norwegian steamship loaded with supplies for a World War I relief effort collided with a French vessel carrying munitions to France, killing almost 2,000 people and injuring some 9,000 others, most of them Halifax civilians. In addition, the blast caused a tsunami that demolished a nearby branch of the Mi’kmaq First Nation. The horror of the explosion was magnified as locals imagined it was the result of a bomb – this was, after all, during a war. Hospitals were overwhelmed by injured people, and even as would-be rescuers headed to the area from Canada and the United States, they found themselves unable to get through as a blizzard covered Halifax and its environs with more than a foot of snow. Michael says his father, Reginald, who was 9 at the time, recalled seeing dead bodies frozen on the ground.

How had I never heard about any of this? 

Michael’s grandfather moved to Toronto, where he died, likely of a heart attack, leaving Reginald and Ruth orphaned. The children were sent to live with an aunt in Pittsburgh. As a single mother who worked as a domestic, their aunt already had her hands full, so she arranged for them to attend a boarding school, St. Katharine Drexel School, outside of Philadelphia. Michael’s father went on to high school at the Saint Emma Military Academy in Virginia, and rose to the rank of captain. While there, his best friend introduced him to his sister, Martina Morse. And so began Michael’s immediate family.

The couple made their home in Washington, D.C., where Martina’s family goes back at least four generations. At a time when the highest level of employment an African-American could hope to attain was working for the Post Office or being a teacher, Michael says, “that’s what my parents did” – his father worked in the Post Office; his mother taught school, following a tradition on her side of the family.

Michael was born in 1944, the third of seven children. Early on, they lived in an apartment in the city’s southwest quadrant; the last two of his siblings were born after the family moved to a house on the city’s northeast side. “It was a very nice house,” he remembers – a detached house built in the 1920s with a gambrel roof, hardwood floors and unpainted chestnut trim. There was a garage under the front porch, and a basement, all in “a very nice neighborhood with big yards” around a park-like area that drew opossums and other wildlife. The family of nine lived with a single bathroom, which didn’t even strike them as worthy of notice, though Michael is now especially appreciative of the cooperation and mutual respect this must have required.

“When we moved there, we were the third Black family on the block; the other two were doctors. We were the first one with young kids. The neighborhood became predominantly Black with white flight. When we sold the house, we sold to the first white people moving back to the neighborhood.”

From first through third grade, Michael attended a segregated public school. After the family moved, he switched to an integrated Catholic school, where he almost had to repeat fourth grade – other students were already taking notes, writing in cursive and doing multiplication and division, all of it foreign to him. He persevered and caught up.

His favorite subjects were social studies, geography and science. But some of his most valuable learning experiences came from his parents, who took the children to cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian. “That was an amazing place to go and see the diversity of what man does and the differences in cultures and the natural world. It was really a refuge for us. We would go on our own, when we were old enough, and just spend hours looking in the museum.” He and his siblings also got library cards as soon as they could print their names. “That was also a very important part of my education. Those things [museums and books] created a sense of curiosity, an awareness of something larger than ourselves.”

Their parents also took them camping. “We were the only African-Americans we came across that camped. It wasn’t really an issue, other than that awareness.” These family trips sparked a lifelong love of the outdoors. “One of the most important things to me, as a consequence of growing up, is my awareness and interest in nature,” he says. Later, with his wife, Sarah Wells, he camped, went backpacking, kayaked (they built their own boats), made long-distance trips by bicycle (once riding the entire length of Newfoundland from south to north) and did an extended trip in Europe. He has also been to the Arctic twice with his brother Martin.

He credits his upbringing with instilling a sense of individuality, but adds that “growing up in a close-knit family, we had a sense of responsibility to others, as well. My mother demanded of us a certain level of behavior that I think was even more so than parochial school. I feel fortunate in my growing up. I think my parents basically did an amazing job of giving us what we needed to survive.”

After high school, Michael studied at Howard University for two years but dropped out because he was “floundering.” He points out that he was paying his own way, “the deal my parents made with us. They paid for our grade and high school, and we were expected to pay for our college education. In those days, that was possible. Most of my siblings got scholarships. Howard University was subsidized, so its tuition was reasonable.

“I felt like I was wasting my time and money” he goes on. “I didn’t have a sense of direction, of what I should be doing. There was an expectation that we would all go to school, so when I dropped out, I felt like I was letting my parents down.” He was surprised and grateful when they accepted his decision and said he could live at home, but “’You have to pay a little rent,’” they told him. He got a job as a page at the D.C. Library. “It was seamless,” he says with appreciation. “My guilt was stronger than their reaction.”

Military Service

Two years later, in 1965, he was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was in full force. Because he did well on the entry tests, those in charge wanted him to become an officer. He had his own opinion. “I knew that would be a mistake; I knew as a draftee I would only have to be on active duty for two years, and if I had become an officer, I would have to have an active duty period of four years. That wasn’t a very good equation, as far as I was concerned. I was actually against the war. It was before there was a lot of counseling about being a resistor.” Besides the lack of guidance for those who might have sought conscientious objector status, he felt a sense of responsibility to his parents to fulfill his duty as a citizen.

During basic training there were so many draftees that instead of barracks, Michael’s unit slept in tents set up with six cots apiece on concrete pads left over from the World War II. “It was better,” he thinks, “because you were not under the constant eye of the sergeants.” He volunteered to be a truck driver, which got him out of kitchen patrol and guard duty.

He recognizes he was fortunate. He was trained as a medical lab tech doing biochemistry and toxicology in St. Louis, which kept him from going to Vietnam. The job wasn’t on a military base, and the hours, from 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m., with no weekends, were easy. All in all, he says, “it was very un-military!” He never even wore his dress uniform, because they wore whites at work.

After two years, he’d satisfied his military obligation and returned to his job at the library in Washington, D.C., where he ended up working for 11 years, advancing from page all the way to supervisor of circulation.

He traces his career in furniture making back to this job at the library. “I was always interested in design, in shape and form,” he explains. “I was teaching myself photography at that point; it was form that was very much part of the images I was making. I became aware of the Shakers and the Scandinavian furniture movement. There were books there! I started reading books about woodworking.”

At this point he brings the conversation back to the neighborhood where he grew up: it was populated by homeowners who worked office jobs for the government, but most of them worked on their own homes, and neighbors helped each other. When his father was painting their house, Mr. Morris around the corner pitched in with his ladder. Michael’s father had been trained as an electrician in high school, which made him a real neighborhood asset. “It didn’t seem like a big deal,” Michael remarks. “You figure out how to do [something], and you do it.” He and his older brother, Martin, agree that attitude gave them the confidence to pursue their interests in art and craft. The family had a workshop in the basement and access to a range of tools – chisels, planes, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, most of them manufactured by Stanley, from the tool chest their mother had given their dad when they were first married. (“It was probably from Montogmery Ward,” Michael adds.) “I used to hang out with [Dad] and other neighbors who were handy. I was like their buddy. They would tolerate me. I would be like a go-fer. That was very important to who I have become.”

At some point while working at the library, Michael became aware of James Krenov and Wharton Esherick. “What they were doing was very interesting to me,” he remembers. Working at the library was “a great job, with nice people. But there was something about it that felt like, ‘I wanted to live what I call an integrated life.’”

He went back to college on the GI Bill and got a degree in anthropology.

Life in New York

“I’d been doing photography and had some recognition. Looking at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, there were Penn and Hiro and [other] well-known photographers.” When his girlfriend at the time transferred from American University to Pratt in New York, Michael thought he’d move to the city with her and become a photographer. He quickly found he “didn’t know anything about running a business. You can have all the skill you have, but if you don’t know how to run a business, you’ll fail.”

He had a landlord who was a plumber; the landlord happened to be working on a kitchen for a client. The brownstones in north Brooklyn were just starting to be converted from rental apartments back to single-family homes. Michael did the kitchen with his older brother. Word got around as people on the block saw him working; they asked if they could hire him. Then a friend who taught college and had invested in four brownstones asked Michael to renovate them all, which gave him significant experience.

But as much as he enjoyed the work, he says he found “being a contractor was much more about the headaches – the estimates, the crew, material procurement, subcontractors…” He decided to move away from general contracting to work of more pointed scope. Kitchen cabinets were a start; he’d built some before he even had a shop, in the basement of the house where he’d been living. But with kitchen cabinets, he said, “the only creative aspect of it was the facades.” (Ouch.)  

The first piece of furniture he made and sold was a desk for the friend with the brownstones. With time, he got more commissions and the work became increasingly interesting. “At a certain point,” he says, “I decided to call myself a furniture maker.” He ended up working as a furniture maker, sharing a shop with friends at Brooklyn Model Works, whose company did props and special effects for advertising and film. He learned on the job; with each succeeding piece, he’d add “one aspect that I had not done before” to develop new skills. Again, books were invaluable – Charles Hayward on joinery, “Cabinetmaking & Millwork” by John Feirer, the “Encyclopedia of Furniture.”

In 1976 he met photographer Sarah Wells, who would become his wife. Sarah and a friend moved into a loft on the Bowery; as Michael’s relationship with her developed, he moved in with them. A couple of creatives making a home together in a New York loft may sound enviable today, but Michael is quick to bring that fantasy back to reality: “It was pretty rough. We were heating with a wood stove.”  In 1980 they were bought out by the restaurant supply business across the street. “That was the first example I knew of a loft being turned back into a commercial space,” he laughs.

They moved to a loft in Chelsea that became home for the next 25 years. Sarah did photography for artists, collectors, galleries and museums. (Two examples of books illustrated by her photographs are “Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture From the Collection of Fern & Manfred Steinfeld” and “The Newark Museum Collection of American Art Pottery”.) “People loved her,” he says. “I always considered that she was so unjudgmental. She didn’t have strong negative responses to people. So we would have community dinners – we had a tradition of having a Thanksgiving dinner in our loft where we would have 25 people. You couldn’t ask for a better life, in a way, other than that you had to always think about being evicted!”  

Michael flourished as a furniture maker. In the late 1980s he was accepted to the first show he ever applied to – at no less than the Smithsonian Museum of Craft. Encouraged, he started doing more shows – the Philadelphia Furniture Show, the Philadelphia Museum Craft Show and the Ace Craft Show in Evanston, Ill. – and kept at it for about 20 years. “These were considered the top shows,” he notes. “They were run by women’s committees – well-to-do women. So the clients, the people who came, were of that class.” But despite the well-heeled visitors, he found that he and his fellow furniture makers made surprisingly few sales at the shows. “Furniture has always been a tough sell,” he reasons. “People don’t buy it just on a whim, the price point and being a large item they had to have the space and need. All my furniture-maker friends, we talked about how it was the stepchild of the craft show, while people doing ceramics, fabric and jewelry sold well. People felt free to buy [those things].” Furniture, on the other hand, required a major investment – “more than most people would do at the drop of a hat.” Over this entire period, he thinks he sold two or three pieces off the floor at shows. Instead, he says, the value of doing shows “was more about talking to people,” checking back with them later and developing a reputation based on word of mouth once people had seen his work in person. His one effort at advertising  in magazines was in Metropolis early on; while that didn’t directly bring in any business, it brought him name recognition.

Meanwhile, he and Sarah shared a life rich in outdoor experiences. They took off a month every summer and went on a trip; they took a week-long back-country ski trip in the winter. “There was not a lot of money involved, but we used to be amazed how much we could do with so little money. It felt like the integrated life I wanted to live.” They backpacked in the Canadian Rockies and the deserts of the Southwest, kayaked the coast of Maine, skied New England and Canada, traveled up the Amazon while in Brazil and studied Tai Chi in China. They were paying $800 a month for their loft in Chelsea, and New York State Loft Law kept the monthly payment at that rate for 25 years.

After Sarah died of cancer in 1998, Michael stayed on in the loft. A new owner bought the building as an investment. More and more of those moving into lofts were not artists but well-paid professionals who coveted the spacious live-in studios in old industrial buildings. Michael understands. “They wanted some of that, too!” Unable to recoup his investment with rents so low, the building’s new owner asked Michael if he’d be willing to be bought out. Finally, in 2005, he was ready to move.

Making a New Life

At first he thought he’d find a place in Brooklyn, but rents were “skyrocketing,” while his income was not. His brother Martin had moved from Chicago to the Catskills; Michael was familiar with the area because he and Sarah had spent time there. He figured he could run his business there just as well as in the city. It took two years to find the right place, in part because he needed shop space, but he eventually found an 1870s farmhouse in Catskill Park. Though the property around the house had originally belonged to the farm, it had been subdivided and developed with houses.

The barn would serve fine as a shop, though it needed major renovation – insulation, electrical wiring, heating and more recently, plumbing. At 24′ x 36′ with 10′ ceilings, it’s smaller than his former shop in Brooklyn, which had about 1,000 square feet and (my heart!) a 15′ ceiling, “but it works,” he says; “I really like it.” And while Michael doesn’t have any domestic animals at present, he shares his piece of earth with bears, deer, foxes, woodchucks, rabbits and skunks, as well as lots of wild birds. “I’m pretty happy here. I have what I need. As you get older, you don’t really need a lot more.”

Michael’s work has slowed since the 2008 recession. For a few years he was part of a group called the Hudson Valley Furniture Makers, with young and older members. The group’s activities in person together “kind of fizzled,” though he says they’re all still friends.

He still gets jobs from time to time, such as a bench for Brockport College near Rochester. The college gave lumber from some trees on campus to six New York furniture makers who would design and build benches for the school. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at Australian National University in Canberra. And he would have participated in the 2020 World Wood Day event in Japan, had it not been cancelled, along with so much else, due to the pandemic.

On the other hand, as a furniture maker who lives and works alone, he says the pandemic hasn’t affected him as badly as it has many others. For fun he bikes, goes fly fishing or skis. He visits friends at a distance and thinks “there’s no point in railing against it, because you can’t do anything about it.”

He also continues to teach. His first teaching job was at Penland in 1995; he taught there again in ’96, ’97, 2002 and 2006. Since then, he has taught at Arrowmont, Anderson Ranch, Haystack, Parsons, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and SUNY Purchase. He’s now teaching a series of classes at the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s wooden boat school called “Foundations of Woodworking,” which covers understanding wood, the use and care of tools and joinery, and culminates in a project. “That’s a lot of fun, because it’s people who aren’t seeking a degree. They just want to learn stuff. I’ve always liked teaching, because, one, it clarifies your thinking about what you do, and the other thing is that I just like working with the people. They’re so grateful, so appreciative. And a lot of them are discovering things about themselves they didn’t know.” Classes have just started up again; he’ll start teaching in late September. On top of this, he teaches boatbuilding.

Boatbuilding? I asked. Isn’t that a specialized subject?

“There’s something about reading,” he chuckles. “I taught myself photography from reading. I taught myself woodworking from reading. It’s the curiosity that’s the important part.”

See a Smithsonian interview of Michael Puryear here.

See American Craft magazine’s article about Michael.

– Nancy Hiller, author of “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