The Arkansas Test

I tried it in Massachusetts

[a short blog post - I’m at Pete Galbert’s teaching a box-carving class. So away from my desk and writing this post as best I can right now…picking up my Craft Genealogy project agai. Sorry for the size of the photos - I can’t seem to make my ipad shrink them…]

I’ve been away from my book project - my Craft Genealogy - for some time now. But I’m about to pick it back up to move it closer to its first full draft. Nearly there. After a hiatus, the first thing I had to do was re-read it. Today’s blog post is one of the stories that will appear in the book - in something like this form. I first wrote this story up in March of 2020 - and it was then the first blog post (at my old wordpress blog) on the subject of my Craft Genealogy.

In Daniel O’Hagan’s notes on chairmaking is a description of a stress-test Dave Sawyer used to apply to his ladderbacks, dated April 1, 1974:

“His chairs are so strong that he recommends what he calls the ‘Arkansas test’ having learned it with other techniques from Arkansas craftsmen. The test is to tilt the chair on one leg and taking hold of a back post exert all one’s weight downwards on the chair which supports it all on one leg; by this any weak point will soon creak or break. ”

The Arkansas chairmakers were Charles Christian and his brother-in-law Jack McCutcheon - I had read about Christian and McCutcheon in Jennie Alexander’s notes. She had seen a January 1978 Associated Press article about them, that they made ladderback chairs with hickory bark seats, etc. Excited, she wrote to Dave Sawyer, asking if he knew of them. Well, as it turned out Sawyer had met them in the early 1970s in Montreal, where several American craftspeople were demonstrating at the Montreal Expo site. They were instrumental in Sawyer becoming a chairmaker.

By that point, JA & Sawyer had known each other for about a year and a half - JA first introduced himself to Sawyer in a letter dated May 1976 – and in an Oct 1976 letter to Sawyer, JA noted:

“It is a small world. I was going over my old notes the other day and saw that the Woody Brothers of Spruce Pine N. Car. had given me your name 2 years ago but I never got around to writing.”

I don’t know how JA got onto the Woody Brothers of Spruce Pine, N.C. – Arval & Walter. Then-John and his wife Joyce had visited them in spring of 1974, and then traded a few letters back and forth.

That’s the back story - then in March of 2020 I was teaching a workshop at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, MN - out on Highway 61. I had a chance that week to make a presentation to the audience of my first notions of this Craft Genealogy project, telling them about my mentors - Alexander, O’Hagan, Langsner, etc and how I was starting to write about their woodworking stories and connections.

One night there, I was browsing the bookshelves in one of the workshops. A variety of Scandinavian stuff, boatbuilding, timber-framing, etc. One little coffee-table National Geographic book “The Craftsman in America” (1975) – so I opened that, and found a photo that I recognized right away, but had never seen before. Arval Woody testing the chair just the way Daniel described Dave’s test. Later, I wrote to Curtis Buchanan to tell him about it and he remembers seeing Arval do this at craft shows. It’d be hard to forget.