Making an object or a design in wood while manifesting traditional behaviors and
working within traditional contexts. Traditional wood carving in the United States
embraces a wide range of forms that accompany human beings throughout their lives.
In childhood, limberjacks, dolls, puzzles, and other toys entertain people. Aduldiood’s
days of work and worship bring spoons, butter and maple-sugar molds, door handles,
knife handles, and other utensils; decorated shelves, cupboards, and other furniture;
chains, balls-in-cages, fans and fan towers, and books made to hold chewable spruce-gum
balls; decoys and decoy helmets for hunting; signs; religious figurines, amulets, objects,
and decorated surfaces; masks and totem poles. In old age, people make their memories
tangible with human and animal figurines; miniature tools (pliers, plows, spinning
wheels, crosscut saws, and the like); miniature traditional boats; transformed objects—
cigar boxes turned into highly decorated picture frames, and peach pits carved into
baskets; assemblages of human, anitnal, and object figurines made into scenes of farm,
lumbering, and family life; and walking canes. Finally, in death, people have been
remembered with carved wooden gravemarkers and other mortuary sculptures.
Traditional carvers differ from people who learn to carve from hobby books alone and
from people who attend art academies. Traditional wood-carvers learn to carve
informally, often by customary example; they watch others, especially relatives and
friends who belong to the same regional, occupational, religious, racial, and ethnic
communities. They usually produce forms that have been produced before; their
emphasis is not so much on creating an object that no one has ever seen as it is on producing a good version—or their own version—of some artifact
that embodies meaning to people in their communities. Traditional wood-carvers keep in
touch with the communities that inspire them, constantly dipping into the community’s
wellspring of knowledge, and they receive suggestions and criticism from community
members.
Many traditional craftspeople who make objects from wood refer to themselves as
“whittlers.” Some use the term “carver,” and some use both terms. Dictionaries present
“whittling” as cutting or paring thin shavings from wood with a knife, a definition that
emphasizes the use of one tool and stresses a casual, almost unintentional mode of
production rather than an object itself. “Carving” conveys the use of chisels and other
tools in addition to jackknives, as well as a more intentional mode of production of an object. Both terms refer to the creation of three-dimensional objects and surface
decoration.
“Sculpture,” dictionaries indicate, refers to the “art” of carving wood into threedimensional representations. Such a definition would clearly include academically trained
artists such as Henry Moore and Constantin Brancuşi, sculptors in wood and other
materials. Instead of claiming an exclusive plane for sculpture in the world of art
production, however, folklore study argues that whittlings, carvings, and sculptures are
all art, and that traditional artists may whittle, carve, or sculpt. All are aesthetic
experiences, the results of play, of need, and of the shaping of deeply felt values into
meaningful forms. One could say that there is a great deal of interplay among the three
words: “whittling” refers to the production of three-dimensional objects and surface
decoration using jackknives only; “carving” refers to the use of many tools, such as
jackknives, chisels, and chainsaws, in making three-dimensional objects and surface
decoration; and “sculpting” refers to the use of many tools in the production of threedimensional objects.
Traditional wood-carvers learn dieir skills in a community where certain occupational,
religious, regional, ethnic, and racial contexts overlap. Their learning also takes place in a
particular historical moment when market pressures and attitudes toward collecting other
peoples cultural goods influence production. Before about 1910, for example, most
traditional wood-carvers rarely sold their work for money; instead, they gave pieces away
or exchanged them for other goods with family and friends. With the increased interest in
what the fine-art world called “folk art,” carvings were sought after for collections, both
private and public. Also, the Arts and Crafts movement in urban centers and the southern
Appalachians saw many Northern social workers encouraging recent immigrants and
mountain people to carve for pleasure and profit and to sell their works through
cooperatives. Since the mid-1960s, increased numbers of folklife festivals throughout the
United States taught wood-carvers the possibilities of selling. Now many traditional
wood-carvers make some or all of their living, especially as they approach retirement,
from their carving. A detailed discussion of three wood-carving families will illustrate
how traditional carvers learn their skills, how carving operates in their lives, and how
market influences affect their work.
Beginning in the early 19th century, as lumbering concerns sent groups of men into
the forests of Maine and then onto the North Central and Northwestern states, their
traditional artwork traveled with them. Evenings in the “barroom” (bunkhouse) of a
logging camp often found men singing, telling tales, playing cards, knitting socks, and
carving wood. Especially men of Scandinavian, Russian, French, and Native American
backgrounds decorated the frames and handles that they made for their bucksaws, knives,
axes, and crosscut saws. Using one piece of pine and a knife, men fashioned books with a
spine or a face that slid open; men climbed up spruce trees, cut “gum” (sap) balls from
the limbs, and placed them in the books as gifts of chewing gum for mothers, sisters, and
sweethearts. These gum books were often highly decorated with designs such as crosses,
initials, and trees, and with row after row of carefully cut triangular chips. From a piece
of white cedar, woodsmen also made hand fans and fan towers (vertical towers with a fan
or two made to slip part way down the tower) as gifts or to while the time away with and
then feed to the fire. Men less skilled in carving paid others to carve gifts for them. With
the closing of many of the logging camps by the mid-20th century, the contexts for much of the lumbermen’s art is now the families and town communities of independent loggers,
retired loggers, or descendants of loggers—people such as the Christiansens of Oakridge,
Oregon, the VanAntwerps of Lansing, Michigan, and the Richards of Rangeley, Maine.
William Richard (1900–1993) of Phillips, Maine, a French Acadian logger who
emigrated from New Brunswick, learned double-fan-tower carving from Raymond
Bolduc, a fellow logger. As a child, William carved all of his toys and watched as his
brother made a fiddle and as neighbors built and decorated homes, furniture, and tools.
He passed on his logging and wood carving skills to his son and grandson, Rodney
(1929) and Rodney Jr. (1955), who, as loggers and mill workers, also whittled toys and
now carve chains, animals and birds, loggers with old-time woods tools, and other human
figures from local basswood and pine, using jackknives, chisels, and chainsaws.
Although no women in the family carve, Rodney’s wife, Lucille, comments on the
carvings and often affects the final shape of a form.
After attending several festivals in the late 1970s, the Richards began to sell their
carvings. As the years passed, they created new versions of earlier carvings, often in
response to customers’ requests or dares. “Anything I can see in my mind,” Rodney
explains, “I can put in the wood.” Rodney’s work has been exhibited internationally, and,
with a group of local supporters, he founded the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging
Museum for the preservation and celebration of the logging heritage of western Maine.
To the southwest, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, the Lopez family carves
bultos (images of saints, also called santos de bultos), coronitas (crowns), animals, trees
with birds and animals, manger scenes and other religious scenes and stories (“Flight into
Egypt,” “Death Riding in a Cart”). All are carved in the round from local aspen, cedar,
cottonwood, and pine. Folklorist Charles Briggs writes in his study of the family that
Nasario López (1821–1891) was an image maker who, like others, used many colors of
paint to decorate his images. Though all of his sons were carpenters, his youngest, José
Dolores (1868–1937), was propelled into carving by a personal hardship when, in 1917,
he worried continuously over his son who had left to serve in World War I. He began to
decorate picture frames, clock shelves, and lamp stands with chip carvings and then
turned to images, animals, and trees.
Further encouraged by folk-art collectors in the 1920s and pressed by rapidly changing
economic conditions, José Dolores began to carve for a living, creating new forms and, at
the request of patrons, leaving his carvings free of paint. His creativity lives on in the
many carvers of Córdova, including his children George (1900–1993), Nicudemos,
Raphael, Ricardo, and Liria and their spouses Silvanita, Precídez, and Benita and several
of his grandchildren and their spouses. Unlike the 19th-century carvings made by Nasario
for the chapels and worshipers in nearby communities, contemporary carvings are
purchased largely by persons of a different social class, cultural background, and religion.
Where the carvings once mediated between Hispanic Catholics and their God, they now
create bridges between people of dissimilar traditions.
Religious impulses have also inspired wood carving in African American
communities. From the 1920s, Elijah Pierce (1892–1974), barber, preacher, and Mason
spoke through wood to members of his Columbus, Ohio, community. “Everything I
carve,” he said, “I want it to tell some kind of a story” Pierce was raised on a farm near
Baldwyn, Mississippi, and began carving as a boy, cutting names and designs into bark of
trees on his father’s farm, then carving small animals and hickory walking sticks. His mother’s brother, Lewis Wallace, taught him how to work in wood. “Anything that I
could picture that I could carve, I used to carve it. Horses, cows, dogs, chickens…. I just
naturally loved the knife when I was a kid.”
Because of several childhood events, his Baptist family and community believed he
had a God-given gift of prophecy and preaching. But Elijah, drawn to barbering and
desirous of an independent trade, answered God’s call through his carvings. He drew on
the aesthetics of everyday living constantly performed within his African American
community, transforming the sermons and stories he heard into wood. From the 1930s
on, he created reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages of moral lessons and sacred stories—
“Monday Morning Gossip,” the “Grim Reaper,” “Samson,” “Christ Entering Jerusalem,”
and the “Crucifixion.” His preaching stick, a walking stick made from a cue stick, is
topped with a man, a barber chair, and a comb and decorated all over with secular,
religious, and Masonic motifs. After a customer would enter his barbershop, Elijah would
ask him his trade and then carve an emblem of it into a stick.
Elijah also carved secular pieces that featured Afirican American heroes as well as
community perspectives on national events and political figures—“Martin Luther King
Jr. and the Kennedy Brothers” and “Pearl Harbor and the African Queen.” His favorite
carving, “The Book of Wood,” consists of four two-sided panels of wood, each 27 1/8
inches by 30 3/4 inches carved with figures representing the seven great churches of Asia
Minor and the thirty-three years of Christ’s life on Earth. “Let’s make a book,” his wife,
Cornelia, had suggested, “a book of wood.” During summer vacations, Elijah and
Cornelia packed their car with carvings and traveled to revivals and churches in a number
of states, where they staged informal programs and explained the iconographic and moral
implications of each carving.
He also gave carvings to members of his congregation, usually bestowing a sermonette
at the same time. Recipients often commented on Elijahs powers of divination, as if the
artist knew just who needed what story-carving. He and Cornelia also opened their home
to people who wanted to see their “unique Biblical and Educational Art exhibit.” In 1969
Pierce began to hang his carvings on the wall of his barbershop, and in 1971, a year after
his first interview with an art student, his work was exhibited outside his community.
Pierce’s wood carvings have been shown internationally. “I dream things the way they
ought to be,” Elijah explained “I can see them in my mind and I know what they are
going to look like.”
Traditional wood carvings, whether whittled, carved, or sculpted, proceed from the
talent of an individual whose work is informed by communally based aesthetics and
performances. Influenced by the marketplace to differing degrees, traditional carvers also
carve because they want to memorialize—and pass on—some aspect of their
communities’ wisdom and heritage. With a knife and some wood, carvers reach for the
world and, sometimes, beyond.
Margaret R.Yocom
References
Becker, Jane S., and Barbara Franco. 1988. Folk Roots: New Roots; Folklore in American Life.
Lexington, MA: Museum of Our National Heritage.
Briggs, Charles L. 1980. The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an
Artistic “Revivai” Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Bronner, Simon. 1985. Chain Carvers: Old Men Crafting Meaning Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.
Dewhurst, C.Kurt, and Marsha MacDowell. 1987. A Fantastic Tradition: Cedar Fan Carving in
Michigan. In Michigan Folklife Reader, ed. C.Kurt Dewhurst and Yvonne R.Lockwood. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, pp. 47–56.
Fair, Susan W., ed. 1985. Alaska Native Arts and Crafts. Publications of the Alaska Geographic
Society. Vol. 12, No. 3. Anchorage: Alaska Geographic Society.
Hufford, Mary, Marjorie Hunt, and Steven Zeitlin. 1987. The Grand Generation: Memory,
Mastery, and Legacy. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution; Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Jones, Suzi. 1977. Oregon Folklore. Eugene: University of Oregon Press.
Ohrn, Steven, ed. 1984. Passing Time and Traditions: Contemporary Iowa Folk Artists. Des
Moines: lowa Arts Council; Ames: lowa State University Press.
Quimby, Ian M.G., and Scott T.Swank. 1980. Perspectives on American Folk Art. Winterthur, DE:
Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; New York: W.W. Norton.
Roberts, Norma, ed. 1992. Elijah Pierce, Woodcarver. Columbus, OH: Columbus Museum of Art;
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Yocom, Margaret R. 1994. “Cut My Teeth on a Spud!” Rodney Richard, Mad Whittler from
Rangeley, Maine. Chip Chats41 (1):17–19.