Recently I discovered that I could make a chair frame by splitting a round red oak log into square chair parts, “riding a shaving horse” for fashioning the square pieces back into round shapes, and fitting them together into a final piece. I want to show how such a project is like a ritual act performed during a liturgy in a kind of sacred space, the one for learning the regional folk ways of rural Appalachia, the Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina.
I had only five days to learn, practice, and apply skills in making the frame for this chair. It proved a crash course in how masters of a craft discipline their apprentices. Such schooling has a long, distinguished pedigree, dating back to European guilds in Medieval times right up to recent times in the self-sufficient Appalachian communities who pass down their community-sustaining craft activities to their descendants. And in a holler within the southwest corner of North Carolina the Campbell school has been offering a wide variety of such craft-making experience to such novices as me since 1925.
Pieces that look like firewood are split from the log for the raw rails and posts of the chair using a hand-forged wedge that is held stationary by its wooden handle while hammered with a “shalaylee”, a wooden club made from a section of tree limb. The maneuver ensures that the pieces are rendered in consistently correct sizes.
This is the template our instructor, Reid Gamble uses to demarcate sections of a quarter-split log in order to maximize the number of pieces for making the chair parts.
We were each given a set of pre-split “kindling” consisting of every piece needed for a chair.
Shaving
gnarly oak greenwood with a draw knife while sitting on a “shaving horse” is a
practice performed forcefully and continually until the procedure becomes a kind of Zen, incorporating a combination of focus and finesse. The majority of all this shaving is to reduce each roughly square plank of wood to a four-sided prism of uniform dimension.
To round each edge of a four-sided vertical post of the chair requires shaving off a strip of uniform width and thickness in one move. Here, the first three edges of this post are already done. The fourth awaits my Zen move.
This is the result.
I must take the post out, reverse it, and clamp it down, ready to perform the same step to complete the edge of the post.
This last set of pulls completes the transition of an elongated four-sided prism to an eight-sided one. The eight edges of this prism are drawn smooth with supple strokes using a smaller draw knife. It took carving up the first three posts the previous day over ten hours, with breaks for lunch and dinner, using amateurish, hap-hazard whittling until we were exhausted to conjure the Zen for shaving the fourth post, performed first thing in the morning, fresh from a night’s rest. The series of steps performed themselves as if without my help, flowing like a stream of water with nary a ripple.
The chair carpenter has to keep the primary tool, the draw knife, razor sharp.
Some meals were rushed in order to get back to the task at hand, yet I slowed down for this one to enjoy the views from the deck with Adina despite feeling tenseness during the abbreviated meal time.
Instructor Reid sits riding bronco to demonstrate technique. M. Reid Gamble makes chairs on his acreage bequeathed to him by his grandparents in Wilkes County, North Carolina. In fact, he cut the red oak tree used in our workshop from that property on Rendezvous Mountain.
The posts, rungs, seat stretchers, and back slat are laid out for assembly.
All the shaving had been out of doors on the airy porch. The carpentry that is mostly the final assembly took place on the last day using hand tools, including Reid’s personal antiques found in old used tool shops, including a famous one near our home in Maine, the Liberty Tool Shop. Reid had been worried we’d run out of time, so we pulled a night shift before the school-wide, open-air craft share-fair.
If the shaving horses had been row boats, then our flotilla could have been rowed across the sea of shavings to England.
By Friday all of us chair makers were exhausted but happy to share the results with the Campbell community folk.
Reid said these chairs are so solidly made that somebody could “kill a man” with one. I looked up his reference in the story Light in August, key reference: ”…the man who brained Simon McEachern with a chair…” I am not surprised that Reid, of rural North Carolina, knows this story, written by the preeminent author of the Deep South, William Faulkner.
We couldn’t make a chair seat because time had run out, but instructor Reid weaves together one on the group preliminary training stool after the closing ceremonies. He said we could Zoom with him to show each of us how to weave a seat, so I purchased from him, at discount, a spool of reed but will first try to make the seat myself, using a YouTube tutorial.
