The Beauty of the Warm and Familiar

The Furniture of Walker Weed

BY EDWARD S. COOKE, JR.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF WALKER WEED EXCEPT AS NOTED

Walker Weed working on a dining table in his Gilford, New Hampshire shop, 1956.

Nestled above the Mink Brook in Etna, New Hampshire, a half mile from the Appalachian Trail, sits a small, red, one-and-a-half story vernacular house built in the late eighteenth century. Adjacent to it is a weathered barn and behind it lie a beautiful flower garden, a pond, and the hardwood forest. This is the comfort zone for Walker Weed, the nearly 90-year old furnituremaker who has lived here since 1965. In many ways the setting says much about the craftsman, who has spent his career in New Hampshire working primarily with native hardwoods, satisfying local clientele, drawing upon an understated and traditional regional aesthetic, and balancing his commitment to furniture with his fondness for the outdoors. In living close to nature, he is the Henry David Thoreau of the studio furniture world, albeit with a sense of humility and humor and a keen interest to engage with those younger than he.

     As a youth in Montclair, New Jersey, Walker gained great appreciation for the lines and construction techniques of New England colonial furniture through his grandmother, Zulette Goodrich Weed, a native of Hartford (one of the most active centers in American antique collecting in the late 19th century) and friend of J. B. Kerfoot, an expert in American pewter.

     He was able to apply this early interest in furniture into practice while taking Sloyd woodworking courses in elementary school. The Sloyd approach, with its emphasis on progressively more challenging sequences of tools and techniques and on the whole person, has profoundly affected Walker through his life. At the age of 12, he purchased a circular saw, lathe, and set of hand tools from Sears and set up a shop in his family’s basement. While other children may have established lemonade stands, Walker made “tub benches,” plank coffee tables with splayed, through-tenoned turned legs, which he sold to relatives and neighbors for $5 each.

     In 1936 Walker left his home shop behind and matriculated at Dartmouth, where he majored in Modern English Literature and joined the Dartmouth Outing Club. The DOC provided him with his real education as an outdoorsman and naturalist. He took up hiking, canoeing, and skiing, and spent two summers maintaining trails and cabins. Upon graduation, Walker worked briefly as a manufacturer’s representative for Harry L. Grant, a machine tool firm, before getting drafted in March of 1941. Parlaying his skiing skills, he joined the legendary 10th Mountain Division, which was first readied for action in the Aleutians and then sent to fight in the Italy campaign.

1. “Hutch Table” (1948-51); pine.

2. “Fall-front Desk” (1951-54); pine.

3. “Coffee Table” (1953); butternut and cherry.

4. “Shaker Cupboard” (c. 1955); butternut and white pine; and “Shaker Chair” (1957); black walnut.

     After the end of World War II, he moved to Washington to work again for H. L. Grant, for whom he located and brokered the sale of government surplus machine tools. Named the New England regional representative in late 1946, Walker and his wife Hazel moved to Longmeadow, Massachusetts in 1947 and he soon began to make furniture for their home. By the fall of 1948 the surplus business was declining, and Walker decided to move up to Gilford, New Hampshire, to launch a cabinetmaking business with his college roommate Gary Allen and Allen’s neighbor Gus Pitou.

     Named The Gilford Work Shop, the partnership parlayed Weed’s pragmatic cabinetmaking skills, Pitou’s sales skills, and Allen’s interest in craft work. Working primarily in white pine, Gilford Work Shop drew inspiration from two well-known books on colonial furniture: Wallace Nutting’s Furniture Treasury (1928) and Russell Kettell’s The Pine Furniture of Early New England (1929). The latter focused upon simply made vernacular furniture and included some measured drawings. It proved the most influential in the shop’s designs for dressers, hutch tables (1), trestle tables, stools, chests of drawers, spoon or pipe racks, candle boxes, and hanging shelves. The only type of furniture they did not make were chairs, which they purchased from a firm in Gardner, Massachusetts. The shop was fully equipped with basic hand and power tools including a tablesaw, planer, joiner, router, dovetailing jig, and belt-sander. The furniture was finished with water stains and brushed lacquer. In addition to satisfying local clients, they published brochures for mail order sales and placed advertisements in House Beautiful.

     The Gilford Work Shop was reasonably successful, but towards the end of 1951 the shop closed since the three partners found that their output could not really support three families. Walker found work for several months at the Allen Rogers Company of Laconia, a production turning shop that made golf tees and toys, before going out on his own as a one-person shop. His decision was based in part on the support provided by the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, which he had joined in 1949 when the League Fair was in Gilford, and in part on the encouragement of David Campbell, the League’s Director. In addition to providing a web of like-minded artisan friends (such as potters Gerry Williams and Edwin and Mary Scheier and leatherworker Gordon Keeler), the League provided sales opportunities in the various shops around the state and at their annual fair. Walker soon found a steady demand for his work, especially fall front desks (2). Also essential to his decision was the full support of Hazel, an accomplished spinner and weaver in her own right, who provided constant encouragement, took over the bookkeeping, maintained communication with customers, and even did upholstery work. Walker began to make more of his furniture out of hardwoods, set aside a small corner of his barn shop as a showroom, and took advantage of other local or regional opportunities to show the range of his work.

     Soon after establishing his own shop, Walker began to develop his own design sensibility. Three influences coalesced during the period from 1953 to 1956. The first was the warmth of Scandinavian Modern design, which he encountered in magazines and firsthand at the 1954 exhibition Design in Scandinavia: An Exhibition of Objects for the Home at the Brooklyn Museum. He immediately responded to the straightforward forms, simple lines and gently modeled edges of that style and began to experiment with a more modern aesthetic, as seen in a 1953 cherry and butternut coffee table (3).

     At the same time, he gained firsthand experience with Shaker furniture when a Gilford neighbor who owned a pair of dining chairs made in 1834 by Micajah Tucker of the nearby Canterbury Shaker Community asked him to fill out the set by making six copies. The balanced design and details, such as 19° undercut bevel along the front and sides of the seats and the lambs tongue transition where this side bevel neared the back edge, intrigued Walker, and he acquired a copy of Edward and Faith Andrews’ Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect (1937) in the spring of 1954. While he made some versions of Tucker’s chair using the same types of wood (white pine and maple), he also made versions from walnut, cherry, or maple (4). He also drew inspiration from Shaker case furniture, but added full dust boards between drawers and put his own twist on it by making it bilaterally slightly asymmetrical, as in the butternut cupboard (4) he built around 1955 for Hazel.

PHOTO BY JEFFREY NINTZEL
	PHOTO COURTESY OF CURRIER MUSEUM

5. “Settee” (1956); walnut.

6. “Coffee Table” (1957); black willow and walnut.

7. “Desk and Block-back Chair” (1957); walnut and butternut (desk); walnut (chair).

8. “Leather Chair” (1957); walnut and leather. Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire. Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2007.4.

     A final influence of this time period was meeting George Nakashima through the gallerist Josephine Kirpal of Rabun Studios in New York, where the Pennsylvania craftsmen showed work from the late 1940s on. Nakashima, another maker who was influenced by both Scandinavian and Shaker furniture, stressed that “young people with limited income should be able to buy good furniture,” and thus confirmed Walker’s own market interest in making affordable furniture “that you like and would be happy to live with.”

     Although Nakashima and Weed shared a similar foundation, it is instructive to recognize the differences. While the former relied on thick, richly figured plank seats and table tops as the main aesthetic, often simply placing them on simple engineered bases, the latter developed a lighter touch that relied on subtlety of mass and line, perhaps best seen in the block-back chair he began to make in 1956 (7). Walker liked the contrast of the solid blocky crest, which was dished out only along the front surface, to the traditionally conceived plank seat and splayed legs that are tenoned through the seat and wedged. He felt that the “little out-of-proportionateness” of the block endowed the chair with a “degree of whimsy.” In other ways Walker’s block back chairs resembled the work of Sam Maloof, who glued up lower grade black walnut with contrasting heartwood and sapwood. In gluing up boards for the seat or the blocky crest, Walker often oriented the light sapwood of a board along the edge to be glued, resulting in a light stripe. As was consistent with his earlier work, Walker remained a pragmatic furnituremaker, relying on machinery like a router to round the edges of the tapered legs and developing an incline jig to rough out the dished seat with a router.

     Walker’s graceful settee of 1956 (5) also offers a glimpse of his mature style and an instructive contrast with Nakashima’s conoid benches, which featured a crotch-plank slab seat with short stubby turned legs and a stiff comb back. Walker reworked a Shaker design by increasing its overall length to eight feet, softening many of its edges, and then lightening its stance by using widely splayed legs set in to accentuate the cantilevered effect of the seat. Other design refinements included a beveled undercut on the seat edge, book-matched 75° cants to the legs and the rear posts, slightly lightened ends to the crest rail, and the use of a bow-tie shaped medial stretcher to increase strength and lower the visual center of gravity. To maximize strength without adding to the bulk of the legs and to simplify finishing, Walker also developed a separate framed base that was screwed to the underside of the seat. Made efficiently and with full understanding of the materials, the settee seems to smile in a modest way, a fair representation of the maker.

Making a chair

IN LATE 1956, CONRAD BROWN, then editor of Craft Horizons, traveled north to Gilford, New Hampshire, to interview Walker Weed for a feature article in the magazine. His “Walker Weed: Yankee Cabinetmaker” appeared in the February 1957 issue, the same month that Furniture by Craftsmen opened at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. While visiting with Weed, Brown took photos of the craftsman making a block back chair, his signature seating form featured in both the article and the exhibition. This series of photographs was never published and has remained in the possession of Weed. They are remarkable imagess that clearly document Weed’s pragmatic approach—the use of jigs, integration of machines and handtools, and even a bit of ingenuity such as using a dado blade and pipe to round the tenon at the top of the legs. Seeing the sequence permits rich insights into the world of a first generation studio furnituremaker, one firmly based in the integration of design and economic realities rather than in idealistic indulgence.

     The process begins with the seat blank,, which is glued up from 8/4 stock, thiicknessed to 1-3/8″, and squared to 17″ × 17″ (A). Leg holes are drilled on an angled holding fixture using a 1-1/2″ Forstner bit (B). The seat depression is shaped with an inclined fixture and a router (C). The shape is then refined by belt-sanding with a curved form attached to the platten (D). Once this is done, the seat blank is bandsawn to shape.

     The legs come from 8/4 stock that is cut to 18″ lengths and then tapered on one side from 1-5/8″ to 1″ using a tablesaw fixture. Round tenons (1-1/2″ diameter by 2″ long) are cut at the top of each leg by clamping it in a pipe fixture and rotating it over a tablesaw dado blade (E). The second side of each leg is then tapered from 1-5/8″ to 1″. A kerf for the wedges is cut in the tenons with another tablesaw fixture (F). The edges of the legs are rounded with a 1/2″ radius roundover bit. The legs are glued and wedged into the seat, with wedges set at right angles to the grain of the seat (G). After the glue has dried, the wedges are trimmed (H) and sanded flush.

     Holes for the back spindles are bored into the seat using a fixture to maintain the correct drilling angle (I). Backs are cut and shaped on the bandsaw from 2″ × 4″ × 17″ blocks, then bored for the spindles on the drillpress. There are eight spindles, six at 1/2″ and two at 3/4″. These are then glued into place (J).

     Finally, the chair is sanded and finished, usually using Watco oil (K).

     As he was developing his mature style, Walker also became involved with the American Craftsmen’s Educational Council through the continued friendship of David Campbell, who had become Executive Vice-President of the national organization. Walker became a Craftsman Trustee in 1955, and in 1957 he was invited to participate in the wood panel at the ACEC’s Asilomar Conference in California. Sharing the podium with Wharton Esherick, James Prestini, Charles Eames, Tage Frid, Sam Maloof, and Jake May, Walker held his own, speaking directly and with a light-hearted sense of humor. At this conference he established lifelong friendships with Maloof and Bob Stocksdale, and for the first time the three of them felt part of a larger, national movement. At the conference, Walker articulated a design philosophy based not on self-expression but rather as the product of experience, respect for materials, precedent, and function. His was a practical view based on economy and restraint. He detailed his business model at that time: he worked alone in a 1,000 square foot shop, making about 75 pieces of furniture a year and selling most of it directly to his customer. About half was custom work, the other half repeated designs such as his drop leaf tables or his Shaker or block back chairs. He built his customer base through word of mouth, references from the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, and magazine articles such as the one that appeared in the February 1957 issue of Craft Horizons (see sidebar above).

     For the seminal 1957 exhibition Furniture by Craftsmen at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Walker showed a walnut block back chair, walnut drop leaf table, walnut and butternut bedstead, and butternut and walnut desk (7). In the desk, he contrasted the related woods, using the darker walnut for the top and legs and the lighter butternut for the drawer fronts, and developed a distinctive approach to using splayed legs on a case piece of furniture. He began with larger stock so that he could line up the inner edge to be square with the drawer sides, used a router to taper and round the outer three edges of the legs, and then used a carving gouge to smooth the transition along that inside edge of the legs. As a result, the legs flow gracefully into the carcass of the desk and provide the overall form with an animated stance. He adapted the same leg design the following year to a walnut and butternut sideboard, for which he used tambour fronts to eliminate the space taken up by swinging doors.

     Aside from the exhibition pieces, Walker made two other important works in 1957. He responded to the popular sort of circular coffee table being offered by Knoll and Herman Miller by developing his own version in wood, using richly figured black willow for the top and for the circular base, which was constructed by dovetailing together eight equal-sized rim elements, and then using walnut spindles to connect the two parts (6). With fellow League craftsman Gordon Keeler, a leatherworker, Walker also made a chair with a slung leather seat (8). It was a chair frame that he returned to often, but incorporating different upholstery materials such as sea grass or corduroy woven by Hazel.

      For eleven months in 1960 and 1961, Walker, Hazel, and their two children lived in Asker, Norway. Walker established strong contacts among Norwegian craftsmen, met Hans Wegner, worked in a shop at Semskol (a local teacher’s college), and learned about lamination while making skis. Shortly after his return, in 1962, he showed a chest of drawers, dining table, and two chairs in the New England Invitational Crafts Exhibit at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In an exhibition dominated by ceramists, jewelers, and fiber artists, Walker’s work stood out.

     That same year Virgil Poling, who had established the craft workshops at Dartmouth in 1941, asked Walker to work two days a week as a woodworking instructor at the newly opened Hopkins Center, an extracurricular facility that offered separate shops for blacksmithing, glassblowing, jewelry, pottery, and woodworking. For two years Walker commuted from Gilford. When Poling left Dartmouth in 1964, Walker assumed the Directorship of the Student Workshops in the Hopkins Center, and the family moved to nearby Etna in 1965. Walker’s teaching responsibilities, David Campbell’s untimely death in 1963, and the shifting fashion in studio furniture towards expressive, free-wheeling, ahistorical sculptural forms curtailed some of Walker’s national exhibition activity, but his regional focus remained strong. He continued to show at regional and League-organized exhibitions and to make work on commission.

     The kind of teaching Walker pursued was not training professional makers, but rather introducing members of the Dartmouth community—undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and employees—to the fundamental qualities of craft. Through work in the shops, students gained appreciation of seemingly simple things, respect for disciplined performance, and awareness of the importance of patience and perseverance. By demonstrating a sequence of planning, commitment, and follow through, he offered a collegiate Sloyd that provided skills for life. As he recently wrote: “Becoming skillful in craft is a source of great joy. Making useful things with one’s hands gives you a sense of accomplishment and also a basis for judging the beauty and quality of the utilitarian objects with which we live. Even the simplest things that have been made with love contribute much to our happiness and understanding.” While he may not have produced generations of students who made furnituremaking or teaching their careers, he profoundly influenced many who wandered into the Hopkins Center.

PHOTO BY JEFFREY NINTZEL

9. “Hanging Chair” (1968); white ash and iron.

10. “Step Ladder” (1978); Sitka spruce and white ash.

     While focused on his Dartmouth teaching, Walker hardly eschewed the field of studio furniture. He taught a workshop at Penland in 1973, participated in a session at Haystack in 1976, and taught at Anderson Ranch in 1977, 1981, and 1983. He also organized a lecture series, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to bring Sam Maloof, Bob Stocksdale, James Krenov, Tage Frid, Don McKinley, Bruce Beeken, and Lance Lee (from the Apprentice Shop boatbuilding school in Bath, Maine) to Dartmouth between the fall of 1977 and spring of 1980.

     His own work continued to grow during the same period. In 1968 he applied the lessons of lamination he learned while making skis to create a hanging chair, patterned after the enclosed basket chairs of Scandinavia (9). Made of laminated strips of 1/8″ white ash glued up on three different forms, he used half lap joints to secure the parts and then an iron gimbal to hang it from a chain so that the seat was about 15″ above the floor. The innovation of this lamination, which predates the extensive lamination developments of the 1970s, was recognized by the chair’s inclusion in the important 1975 exhibition The Language of Wood at the Burchfield Center in Buffalo. Since 1968, he has made about twenty of these hanging chairs.

     Walker used lamination as well in constructing a step ladder for his own use in 1978 (10). He improved the basic design by laminating white ash for the stabilizing bows, securing the top to the legs with half-blind dovetails, wedging and through tenoning the stretchers, and using housed dovetails to set in the treads. It is a beautiful tool and therefore adheres to his design philosophy that constantly references use, user, and usability: “Beauty in crafts is identified with use. Use does not mean just utility. An object is to be looked at and touched with the responsive feeling of pleasure in use. Mind and matter are indivisible.”

     Since his retirement from Dartmouth in 1981, Walker has remained busy. He has continued to make furniture, enjoyed turning bowls rather than golf tees, and even made two canoes, a heavy pine dugout weighing 193 pounds in 1995 and a lighter ash and dacron one weighing 19 pounds in 2004. While he recently has spent less time in the shop, he remains an active member of the local Geriatric Adventure Society, hiking, paddling, and skiing in various Arctic environments from Alaska to Scandinavia. He also remains remarkably well read and computer literate, having just upgraded his iMac desktop computer to the latest model in order to take full advantage of its graphic design capability. Over the past fifteen years organizations in the craft field have also recognized his substantial contributions. He was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1992, and in 2008 received the Award of Distinction from the Furniture Society.

     Visiting Walker and Hazel in their Etna home, surrounded by the things they have made or been given by craftsmen friends of theirs, bespeaks the career of a furnituremaker who has worked with dignity, purpose, and humor while giving selflessly of himself as a teacher. He has found beauty in nature, making things, and maintaining friendships. It is in his house that his craft philosophy becomes clear: “The special quality of beauty in crafts is that it is a beauty of intimacy since the articles are to be lived with everyday. It is a beauty of the warm and the familiar.”

Edward S. Cooke Jr. is the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University. He is the author of New American Furniture: Second Generation Studio Furnituremakers and The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture 1940-1990.

Tags: artisan, education, history

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