Popular Woodworking 2005-12 № 152, страница 41

If you're planning to stay at the restored Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Ky., I have some advice: At dawn, after spending the night in a building designed, built and once occupied by the Shakers, walk out onto the lawn. At that moment when the gathering heat of day is burning away the last smoky tendrils of nighttime fog, look across the hills surrounding the village. Scan the horizon to the early morning music of birds and distant livestock. If you do this, I think you'll know something about how it felt to have awakened there 150 years ago when Pleasant Hill was a thriving community of500 practicing Shakers.

I know. This past summer I did it on three consecutive mornings during a visit I made in order to study some of the Shaker furniture in the Pleasant Hill collection.

Of course, the Shakers wouldn't have slept in air-conditioned comfort, as I had. And they were more likely to have gone to their early morning job assignments than to have stepped outside at dawn for a quiet, reflective moment alone.

But if - like me - you've spent a good part of your adult life studying and building Shaker furniture, you're susceptible to the power of the moment. You step outside and you look and you believe.

The Problem With Modern Versions of Shaker Forms

I've been working in the Shaker genre for more than 25 years, and for much of that time, I've been writing about the stuff I build in an effort to share with others

what I have learned about Shaker design principles and construction methods. Like most contemporary makers of Shaker work, I have found the drawing books of Ejner Handberg (Berkshire House Publishers) to be rich sources of ideas - although there is little detail in Handberg's books about how the pieces he studied and measured were assembled.

That kind of technical information can best be found in John Kassay's magnificent volume: "The Book of Shaker Furniture" (University of Massachusetts Press), a book I've encountered on the bench of just about every maker of Shaker furniture I've ever visited. But even in the cases of those pieces so beautifully drawn by Kassay, there are bits and pieces of missing and/or puzzling information that forces makers like myself to offer up our best guesses.

For example, in my book "Authentic Shaker Furniture" (Popular Woodworking Books), I documented the re-creation of a Shaker sewing desk drawn by Kassay. Some of the construction methods detailed by Kassay seemed eccentric, suggesting to me that the original Shaker craftsman had added complexities for reasons that are not now obvious to the modern eye.

As a result, I simplified the construction of the desk to eliminate enigmatically placed parts. I also changed the drawer graduation to an arrangement I found more appealing, and I opted to open each drawer with a pair of relatively small knobs, rather than the single oversized knob affixed to

This signed piece by Charles Hamlin bears the date "Jan. 30th 1877," although some authorities believe it is a much earlier construction.

each drawer in the original. These were all change s that - in my opinion - constituted improvements on the original, while remaining faithful to the Shaker ae sthetic of minimalism and elegance.

In addition, despite the wealth of detail in Kassay's many drawings of the piece, there are no references in those drawings to the methods used by the Shaker builder to fasten in place the desk's two different tops. So here too I had to proceed guided by my instincts and experience. The result is a piece of furniture that - although it is recognizably Shaker - is not an exact replica of any Shaker original.

And this circumstance is not unusual. Although I've built and sold hundreds ofpieces of"Shaker" work, I can't recall a single piece that was an ab solute replica of any specific original. All were modified to a greater or lesser extent to suit my tastes and/or those of my clients. Sometimes the changes were

nothing more than the substitution of one material for another - say cherry for plain hard maple. At other times, the changes were more comprehensive, as in the case of the Shaker sewing desk that appeared in "Authentic Shaker Furniture."

I think this approach is common among contemporary makers of Shaker-inspired work. We rarely produce exact replicas. Instead, we do what the 19th-century Shaker craftsmen did: We take a form that has been passed down to us from earlier makers and re-create that form in the light of our own tastes and experiences.

Built the Way Furniture Should be Built

Most of the furniture in the Pleasant Hill collection is well conceived and well executed, some of it brilliantly so. The cupboard over chest of drawers, signed and dated by Charles Hamlin in 1877, is one such piece (shown above). This

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