Woodwork:
Chairs
Across the Appalachian South, the land and the craftsman long defined the process of constructing furniture. In describing his family’s business, Arval Woody, a member of a renowned western North Carolina family of chair makers, stated that “we get the tree in the forest, and when we finish it up its in the living room.” 1 For many of the chair-makers and other wood-workers who eschewed the machination of more modern production techniques, Arval’s words ring true.
Leading up to the Craft Revival, the majority of chair makers were farmers constructing and selling chairs for supplemental income. Although supplemental to farming such activity was often the sole means of acquiring a cash income. Many also made other wood products including baskets, coffins, and other furniture items. This should not lead to an underestimation of the skill of these craftsmen or the quality of their product. While most often these were not professional artisans, their products exhibit a vast knowledge of their materials and the process of construction. 2
The defining feature of the handmade chair characterized as the traditional southern Appalachian form is its comfort. Birdie Mace distinguished the “settin’ chair”, as it is affectionately known, from its New England cousin, the ladderback chair, when he stated that, "If company comes, and you don’t want ‘em to stay long, well, you bring out one of them ladderbacks for ‘em to sit on. But if you want ‘em to set a spell and visit, well offer ‘em a settin’ chair.”3 Marked by rear posts bent backwards, away from the woven seat, the settin' chair's design allows the sitter to lean back and engage in contemplative sitting. This form is contrasted with the straight rear posts characteristic of the New England ladder-back design.
In spite of such regional conventions, it is important to consider the limitations of attempts to establish any notion of a typical design. While makers often adhered to the basic settin’ chair style, they also frequently employed a myriad of variations and adaptations. Craftsmen used different numbers of slats and posts, designs of the seat’s weave, rockers, and any number of other variations. There was a freedom to the design and construction of these chairs, where variation was often as characteristic as any notion of a set form. 4
Appalachian craftsmen use the natural physical properties of wet or green wood to aid them in the construction of durable goods. Wet wood enables the craftsman to use the pliability of the wood and the shrinkage that occurs as wood seasons or dries to hold the chair together. In order to accomplish this, the craftsmen fit well-seasoned (dried) rounds and rungs into holes drilled into green (wet) posts. The upright posts contract while drying, clamping more and more tightly around the rounds. The correct fitting of a joint requires a great deal of skill and experience to avoid splitting the wood. The differentiation in moisture content allows for a tight fitting joint. This process eliminates the need to use glue or screws in holding the component parts of a chair together. Along with the settin’ chair’s bent-post design, the use of green wood and exclusion of glue and screws mark two primary characteristics of handmade Appalachian-style chairs. 5
The process of construction of hand-made chairs started with the selection and harvest of wood in the forest. Selection of wood was according to factors of production, like strength and the ease of processing. Hickory was most often used for the rounds and backs of the chair, with maple and ash used for the posts. Hickory has a particularly long and straight grain making it easier to split than other types of wood. There was of course variation according to availability, but the selected wood was invariably some type of hardwood. Referring to the selection of wood, venerated North Carolina craftsmen Birdie Mace believed that “if you sent a man out to find arry wood better’n hickory, I don’t reckon he’d ever come back.” 6
The wood was then cut into “bolts” and split into quarters, a process known as blocking out the wood. An axe often started the split, using a maul (a large hardwood club) and glut (a large wedge) to finish the splitting. Unlike saws used in mills, these tools split the log along the grain, preserving the natural strength of the wood. A hatchet roughly formed the posts, rungs, and slats, which were further shaped and smoothed using a drawing knife and draw-horse. Further finishing of these parts was sometimes completed using a lathe. Prior to electricity, workers utilized foot or water powered lathes. The lathe rotates the post so that a chisel can be applied to produce a well-formed post and round. Any part that required bending was boiled and placed into a press. These presses put pressure on the two ends of the wood in one direction and pressure in the middle in the opposite direction. When the wood is dry, a curve remains.
The wood was then allowed to season for a period of time, depending on the type of wood and part. Assembly of the finished component parts utilized a maul so as not to dent or otherwise damage the wood. Carved pegs provided decorative finish and further strength in places. The weaving of the seat represents the final step in the process. Using the inner bark of the hickory tree or corn-shucks for material, the seat was woven according to a number of different designs. 7 While in no way does this description reflect the techniques used by all craftsmen in the construction of chairs, it provides a generalized overview of the process.
While the previous description gives a general conception of the handmade production of chairs in southern Appalachia, changes in the production and supply of furniture in the Southern states were symbolic of larger changes sweeping the South in the period of the Craft Revival. This was the age of the industrialization of the South, a region historically typified by an agriculturally based economy. Southern politicians and business leaders pushed for the establishment of an industrial base to supplement--or even supplant--the agricultural orientation of the region, a transition often termed the “New South.” As a result, a large number of industrial centers emerged in southern states, among these was the establishment of the furniture making industry in the southern Appalachian piedmont.8
By 1902 High Point, North Carolina emerged as the furniture capitol of the South, boasting twenty-six small factories. More manufacturing facilities existed in nearby Hickory, Morganton, and Lexington, North Carolina as well as in Bassett and Martinsville, Virginia. Like other industrial facilities in the New South (textile mills, coal mines, and lumber camps) regular paychecks at furniture centers pulled many mountain farmers and craftsmen away from their homes and previous occupations. Craft Revival leaders feared that the displacement of rural mountain families to urban factory towns threatened to eradicate traditional lifestyles. Capitalizing on their skills and knowledge, the draw to furniture production centers was particularly powerful for many chair makers and other woodworking craftsmen. 9
Furniture factories often employed men for the construction of frames and women to perform the arduous task of caning chair seats. Chair caning was particularly painstaking work as poor quality splits were likely to break and damage workers’ fingers. Neck and back injuries were common from continual hunching over to perform the weave. Caners sometimes worked at home according to piece rates. In the piece-rate system,workers completed a set number of items per week at home and returned to the factory with finished products. They then received new assignments and materials. These workers typically received dreadfully low wages. While the manufacturing centers often were located on the borders of the mountain South, they were fundamental to changes in mountain communities, contributing to the emigration of mountain families. Also, many chair caners lived in the mountains and traveled to these manufacturing centers to obtain their work. 10
Continuity and change characterized the construction of chairs in the southern Appalachians during the Craft Revival era. In this era, Craft Revival leaders worked to establish a market for production of hand-made traditional settin' chairs and other goods as a means of securing a viable income for mountain families. Simultaneously, industrial production of furniture and other goods was drawing families out of the mountains and into the market of mass production techniques. Market changes, as seen with the rise in demand for New England ladder back designs in the 1930s, forced Appalachian craftsmen to adapt their hand-made techniques and products beyond notions of the traditional southern Appalachian form.
Perhaps nowhere are these changes more readily seen than in the Woody's, a family of craftsmen of traditional settin' chairs. Arval Woody and his brothers represent the fifth generation of family chair-makers and continue to build upon this legacy at their shop in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Woody chairs can be found in the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Magazine, and the home of a member of the British parliament. 11 In the late 19th century, Arval’s grandfather transported wagon and sled loads of chairs to the nearby towns of Marion and Rutherfordton, North Carolina to sell for money with which they bought products that could not be grown on the family farm. In Arval’s grandfather one sees the earliest incarnation of the chair-making craftsmen capitalizing on their skills to supplement subsistence farming. Change came with improvements in transportation networks in the mountains and growth in the market for southern furniture and Appalachian-made products in the first decades of the twentieth century. Lucy Morgan, the founder of Penland School of Crafts, noted the growth of the market and the flexibility of the Woody chair-makers in her memoir Gift From the Hills when she stated that, “The Woody’s have adapted their work to the tastes of their own generation and are making beautiful chairs and tables and other handsome pieces of furniture to order.” 12
Adaptation was a characteristic of Appalachian chair-making throughout the 20th century. Arval and his family augmented their production with the use of improvised machinery, like a belt sander utilizing a lawn-mower tire, and a machine used in cutting chair mortises which is dated 1882. Machination was also felt in the Woody family when two of Arval’s brothers took jobs in a local furniture factory. For all of these changes, however, Arval Woody stayed true to the basic process of constructing handmade furniture. The wood is often still harvested in the forest and refined by the craftsman. There are no nails or glue in a Woody chair, as differentiation in the dryness of wood remains the means for holding together these sturdy products. For all of the changes throughout the 20th century, for craftsmen and their construction of southern Appalachian settin’ chairs, one can still look to Arval’s simple words for a basic description of the process: “We get the trees in the forest, and when we finish it up its in the living room.”13
- Patrick Velde
1. Michael Joslin, "Arval Woody: Chairmaker," Highland Handcrafters: Appalachian Craftspeople (Boone, NC: Parkway Publishers, 2005), 219.
2. Allen Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (New York: Russell Sage, 1937), 156.
3. Jerry Israel, “The Mace Family of Chair Makers,” May We All Remember Well: A Journal of the History and Cultures of Western North Carolina Vol. I, (Ed.) Robert S. Brunk (Asheville, NC: Robert S. Brunk Auction Services, 1997), 192.
4. Michael Owen Jones, Craftsmen of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), x-xi. Jones discusses the need to recognize these chair makers as artists and craftsmen producing symbolic expressions rather than simple makers of utilitarian wares.
5. Jones, 10 and Eaton, 153.
6. "Shadrach Mace (1892-1973)/Chairmaker," Artisans/Appalachia/USA (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium, 1977).
7. Jones, 10-20, outlines the construction of a traditional settin' chair from the selection of wood through assembly of component parts. Valuable information can also be found in Israel, 196, and Eaton, 153-158.
8. For information on the emergence of the New South see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: the Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), and Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
9. Ben Lemer, “Furniture Industry of the Southern Appalachian Piedmont,” Economic Geography Vol. 10, No. 2, 183-199, April 1934, and David Carlton, “The Revolution From Above: The National Market and the Beginnings of Industrialization in North Carolina,” The Journal of American History Vol. 77, No. 2, 445-475, September 1990.
10. Jane Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 1998), 144-151.
11. Joslin, 219.
12. Lucy Morgan, Gift From the Hills (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 141.
13. Joslin, 219-222.