shaker makers k e r r y p i e r c e
Charlie Durfee and Peter Turner craft contemporary furniture that reflects the Shaker aesthetic – a philosophy rooted in simplicity.
ike the American makers of high- still, with its Queen Anne origins reveal- elsewhere in the United States. L style period furniture that pre- ing themselves only perhaps in a band- ceded and later co-existed with them, sawn profile of a slipper foot. Sabbathday Lake Shaker craftsmen were involved in the Many contemporary American Sabbathday Lake in southeastern process of reduction, of stripping away furniture makers still turn to Shaker Maine is now home to four practicing superfluous ornamentation, in order models for inspiration; and while few Shakers. These four individuals – two to reveal the fundamental forms that modern American makers reproduce lay underneath carved, turned, and specific Shaker originals, many veneered detail. – particularly those in the Northeast Those early Shaker craftsmen simpli- where Shakerism was most solidly fied the work of the great 18th-century entrenched – acknowledge their debt American craftsmen who had themselves to the usually anonymous craftsmen simplified the more elaborate baroque who fashioned the furniture and and rococo forms that had crossed the woodenware on display at Sabbathday Atlantic from Europe. While a Boston Lake and other Shaker communities Queen Anne candlestand is simpler than the English forms that preceded it, the This Sabbathday Lake pegleg stand is one of the Shaker rendition of that table is simpler oldest Shaker pieces made in the state of Maine. men and two women – continue the library of Shaker research materials. result, any student of Shaker furniture Shaker tradition of self-sufficiency, Brooks is the museum director for the – in particular any student of furniture supporting themselves with their work Sabbathday Lake Shaker community in the historically Shaker occupation of and is in charge of the many exhibits agronomy on the community’s 1,800 of Shaker artifacts available there for acres, as well as craft work. (Herbs public viewing. produced at Sabbathday Lake can be That staff includes a librarian purchased from the community’s web and two guides who offer 75-minute site at www.shaker.lib.me.us/catalog.htm. tours of the museum at Sabbathday Unlike the restored Shaker village Lake. This museum includes not at Pleasant Hill, Ky., which has a staff only artifacts from Sabbathday Lake of 170, Sabbathday Lake operates with but also material from other Shaker a number of volunteers and a paid communities, in particular those in staff of four, a number that increases Maine. Early in the 20th century as to five during the tourist season. One the other Maine Shaker communities employee, Leonard Brooks, lives on the were closing their doors, the material site in a tidy white frame home across possessions of those communities A post-and panel woodbox in the museum collection Route 26 from the Sabbathday Lake were shipped to Sabbathday Lake. As a at Sabbathday Lake.
05.07 | woodcraft magazine 51 produced in Maine communities – will furniture making, as well as everything Turner worked for Greenpeace for find the collection at Sabbathday Lake else, was the product of a lifestyle that eight years doing environmental work, of great interest. put the Shakers outside the American and Durfee worked at the Apprentice The community is one of the mainstream – a lifestyle embracing Shop in Bath for two years in the 1970s earliest Shaker settlements anywhere, the absolute equality of the sexes, the building wooden boats with hand dating to 1783. Within a scant year, the total surrender of personal goods, and tools while living communally with population had ballooned to almost – for many the most perplexing feature other program participants in a small 200. Then on April 19, 1794, the adult of Shaker life – the commitment to collection of yurts (portable wood members of Sabbathday Lake took the celibacy. dwellings) outside town. covenant formalizing their acceptance Charles Durfee and Peter Turner of the doctrine of the founder of the are two of those furniture makers Shaker movement, Mother Ann Lee. whose work strongly reflects the Although other Shaker communities Shaker aesthetic. While could claim larger numbers of neither Durfee nor inhabitants, Sabbathday Lake is Turner embraced the only community in Maine – or the Shaker lifestyle, anywhere else – that has survived to each lived an the present day, continually inhabited unconventional by practicing Shakers. lifestyle in his The pursuit of simplicity in early years. charlie durfee
Charlie Durfee, a furniture maker collections of other Shaker near Woolwich, Maine, lives only 45 museums, in particular the minutes from Sabbathday Lake, but despite this geographical proximity, This stand up desk in old growth pine Durfee hasn’t found himself drawn to is inspired by pieces in Hancock and Mount Lebanon, although the Shakers the furniture in the Sabbathday Lake would not have used the tombstone collection, preferring the work in the -arched panels.
52 woodcraft magazine | 07.07 retain their identity in the presence of a clerk. Following his military service, declining membership. he tried graduate school for a year, “In those days (the 1970s),” Durfee thinking he might pursue a career in said, “there were four, five, or six academics, but he soon realized he very elderly women who were what craved a more active profession. you might call original Shakers. They He then heard about a program in had been lifelong Shakers. They had Bath, Maine, run by Lance Lee called grown up as Shakers. Since then, all the Apprentice Shop, which taught A reproduction of a Queen Anne tavern but one of them has died, the one wooden boat building in a working table: the Shakers would retain the curves, who is now the leader of Sabbathday boat shop. “The people who built in abbreviated form. Lake – Sister Frances who’s probably the boats were apprentices,” Charlie well into her seventies.” explained. “There were instructors museum at Hancock, Mass. (Leonard Durfee’s awareness of the Shaker who were working with them to show Brooks, the current museum director, tradition in furniture making has them along the way. I eventually observes that the collection now prompted him to travel to the Shaker joined in 1975. I came to Bath and includes furniture dating to the 1790s, collections at Hancock, Mass., and Mt. spent two years in the program. There were 8 or 10 or so of us. The guys were all bearded. The women had long hair and skirts – very much the 1970s kind of scene. We lived just out of town in a bunch of yurts, without much heat, no running water, no electricity. In the winter, it was very cold. “That was my first experience A trestle table in cherry taking a piece of rough lumber and demonstrates how old making it into something. Those two forms taken to their simplest can become years were a turning point in my life.” very modern. Over the next 10 years, Durfee worked in a number of woodworking settings, finally opening his own shop in Bath, Maine. Then he and his wife, Jen, bought the rural property on which their home and Charlie’s shop now stand. During his furniture-making life, Charlie has worked primarily in the including much that is available for Lebanon, N.Y., to study the forms on colonial and Shaker genres, although study.) display there. he rarely makes exact reproductions Durfee has visited Sabbathday Lake Like Shaker furniture makers of the of any specific historical forms. many times. He’s attended worship 19th and early 20th centuries, Durfee Instead, he works in the manner of services there. He’s eaten in the dining has worn many different hats during his woodworking ancestors, bringing hall – in Shaker-imposed silence. He his working life. He started out as a a colonial or Shaker sensibility to has been an interested observer over history major at Oberlin College in work he himself has designed. “I like the last 30 years as the remaining Ohio. After graduating in 1968, he the simplicity of Shaker work,” he photos by kerry pierce & courtesy of fox chapel publishing, charlie durfee & peter turner Sabbathday Lake Shakers struggled to was drafted and served in Vietnam as explained. “I enjoy the quiet voice.”
w w w . W o o d c r a f t M a g a z i n e . c o m 07.07 | woodcraft magazine 53 peter{meet Fred Lee Stanley turner}
After an eight-year stint as an suggested that he go out environmental activist for Greenpeace, and get some experience Peter Turner decided to become a in woodworking and then furniture maker. This wasn’t something come back and enroll. “That for which his background had prepared way, you’ll learn more,” Two linen presses from the Pleasant Hill commu- him. It was simply an acknowledgment the admissions director nity were the starting point for this hutch. of the fact that he wanted to make a explained. living using his hands. Peter did go out and work worked in the warehouse, repairing Because he was living in Boston at as a furniture maker, but he never damaged furniture. For the most part, the time, he visited the city’s North returned to enroll at North Bennet this meant burning in shellac sticks Bennet Street School – one of the Street. Instead, he learned the trade in to fill scratches, but, on the strength most prestigious craft programs in the several Boston furniture shops. of this experience, he then landed a country – thinking he might enroll The first of these was the Paine job working at a large Boston shop, there, but the admissions director Furniture Company. There, he building high-end commercial board room furniture. His timing was perfect because he arrived just as the company’s production schedule had slowed enough to allow Peter the time to learn his craft at a leisurely pace. “When I got there, there was this huge shop with a 16” Northfield jointer and big Watkins 16” sliding table saw and only three employees because the company had just lost a huge account.” The owner of the shop allowed Peter to come in on his own time and use this well-equipped shop to work on personal projects. In addition, the private workshop for the North Bennet Street instructors was just across the Form follows function. The shelves on these street and up a couple of flights. “So, side tables have proven to be very useful. whenever I had a question, I’d just paddle across the road and ask. They were all so generous.” When Peter had grown confident of his woodworking skills, he and his wife, Colleen, left Boston for southern Maine, where Peter had grown up. He quickly landed a job in a millwork shop there where he “… avoided most of the laminate work and got to make solid wood doors for some of the buildings downtown.” The turned feet with collar and the clean inset Shaker craftsmen were masters of drawers give this bedroom bench its Shaker feel. matching specific pieces of furniture to specific sets of needs. For example, if a pair of Shaker sisters needed a table within the context of an aesthetically that sense of orderliness, and Shaker with drawers opening on two opposing appealing construction. furniture evokes that feeling in me.” sides so the two sisters could work The Shaker aesthetic has always been a strong force in Peter’s work, The Shaker aesthetic particularly early on when he was “… Over the last three decades in Maine, trying to get a grasp on design. I’ve several forces have exerted powerful always trusted my eye,” he explained. “I influences in the state’s woodworking can look at something and know – if I scene. One is the revival of wooden boat like it – that it’s good. The Shaker stuff making in which Durfee had immersed does that for me.” himself for several years. Another is Peter is a frequent instructor at the the work being done in the shops of Center for Furniture Craftsmanship Thomas Moser, a Maine craftsman in Rockport, Maine, run by Peter noted – at least in his early years – for Korn. (Durfee has taught there as producing many Shaker-inspired forms well.) During his visits to the school, in large numbers. More recently, with he’s had several opportunities to view the establishment of Korn’s school and Korn’s slide show, and something the development of the Lie-Nielsen A quiet design allows the natural beauty of Peter Korn said during one of those Toolworks, Maine has seen a further the figured maple to shine through. slide presentations sticks in Turner’s evolution of the state’s culture of mind. “He said he does this (builds craftsmanship. simultaneously, one on either side of furniture) to provide himself a sense All of this activity has taken place that table, a Shaker furniture maker of order that exists nowhere else in his against the backdrop of one of the would build a piece matching that life. I identified with that 100%. I’m most potent and enduring forces specification. not a very organized guy, but when in American furniture making: the Peter has a similarly pragmatic I build a piece of furniture, it can be aesthetic developed by a handful of 19th approach to his craft. In the case of very precise and completely within my century Shaker craftsmen who labored the project underway on the day of control. to articulate in wood their devotion to my visit – a display for Lalique glass “When you look at a piece, you feel God. hood ornaments – Peter’s client already had a design roughed in on paper. “He had a concept which Kerry Pierce was bases made out of aluminum tubing with a circular top. I suggested Pierce has been a professional furniture maker for more columns made out of his wood than 20 years. He is the author of 11 woodworking books – (eucalyptus) and sent him an article including the recently published “Pleasant Hill Shaker about columns. When he got my idea, Furniture” – as well as dozens of magazine articles. His he switched to wood columns.” The work has appeared in many regional shows, including, most focus here is not on the piece or the recently, Ohio Furniture by Contemporary Masters at the craftsman who’s building it. The focus Ohio Decorative Arts Center. is on meeting a client’s specifications FREE YEAR! 2 YEARS for $29.99!
go to woodcraftmagazine.com and click SUBSCRIBE -or- Complete the form below and mail in an envelope addressed to: WOODCRAFT MAGAZINE PO BOX 7020 PARKERSBURG WV 26102-9916
□ Payment Enclosed □ Bill Me Name Address City State Zip Country E-mail
Best-ever DECORATIVE FINISHES Build Better Send in now to get LUMBER RACK Done Right with a CUT LIST
Projects, Techniques and Products
Build this 2 Years for $29.99! classic SPICE BOX And learn how to… I Dovetail a case
I Divide a cabinet into compartments or go to woodcraftmagazine.com and click SUBSCRIBE I Create a cornice
By providing my e-mail address, I am indicating I’d like to receive information about my subscription and other offers from Woodcraft Magazine via e-mail.
Outside of the U.S and Canada add $30 for postage. Plus… I 4 more projects Foreign orders must be prepaid. Payment in U.S. Funds only. I Famous furniture