OF THE BEST SORT, BUT PLAIN, Early American Life April 1989
Reproducing Chester County Furniture, By Carol McCabe
In a jumble of buildings near the Paoli, Pennsylvania, railroad station, a company of young craftsmen makes furniture the way it was made there in Chester County two hundred years before they were born. These cabinetmakers, nearly all of them under thirty, work for Irion Company Furniture Makers, “an organization dedicated to working with and making furniture of eighteenth-century America,” and they are quietly making a name for themselves among connoisseurs of Pennsylvania Quaker-style furniture.
In several ways, the business that Louis Irion III and his friend, Chris Arato, began eleven years ago seems an anachronism. For example, no part of their cabinetmaking is farmed out to other shops. Everything, from selection of woods to finishing, is done by Irion, Arato, or others on the staff. That staff has grown, from the time when the two men worked downstairs and Irion and his wife, Wanda, lived over the shop, to today’s total of seventeen restorers, cabinetmakers, and finishers.
Under the direction of Irion and master cabinetmaker Arato, these men match boards, hand-fit joints, hand scrape and plane moldings, carve leaves, flowers, vines, and other designs with meticulous care, one at a time.
Each piece made in the shop probably takes shape on a single bench. Such handwork is in contrast to mass production of furniture assembly lines. On some assembly lines, robots do the work, and even top of the line manufactured furniture is produced in multiples. Some excellent manufacturers use compute resized carving machines for decorative accents, for example. To one Irion cabinetmaker, such pieces seem “like Xerox copies or fish sticks. All right, but no individuality,” By contrast, Chuck Bender says, “each piece of furniture seems to me to feel alive. It has its own personality, its own character.”
That is not to say that Irion eschews power tools in favor of hand sawing and planning. The notion that eighteenth-century reproductions should be made with eighteenth-century tools, says Lou Irion, “is like someone in 1765 saying ‘Let’s use sharpened stones.’ No, we take advantage of every modern tool available to us. We try to be as efficient, as productive as we can without sacrificing quality. That helps us keep our furniture affordable without cutting corners.”
Irion’s cabinetmakers use machines until the machine can’t do the job as well as the hand. Power saws, planers, lathes, routers, and sanders expedite tedious and time-consuming tasks, then skilled hands take over.
Of course, as every flea market shopper knows, the word “handmade” is in itself no guarantee of beauty. If “handmade” means a Goddard block-front chest at one extreme, it means the tie rack that got a C in woodworking class at the other.
The maker must have an eye for line and proportion. It is obvious that Irion Company’s young craftsmen share a natural talent for cabinetmaking, although some worked in unlikely fields before they discovered that skill.
Brian Shultz, now in charge of making beds, Irion Furniture’s bread and butter, used to be a plumber. Glen Hicks, whose chairs look like songs sound, filleted fish and shucked oysters at a nearby fish market before he poked his head into the shop one day and asked for a job.
Chuck Bender, now twenty-two, chose a vocational-technical school instead of high school. There, he worked with a European craftsman who taught from the eighteenth century forward. “He began by handing me a plane and a set of chisels and telling me to sharpen them,” Bender recalls. “He gave me a square of lumber and told me to plane it. I may not be as fast with tools as those eighteenth century guys were – I feel humbled by how much a journeyman back then could produce – but I know how to use them.”
Gerald Martin was a cabinetmaker in Virginia when he answered an ad Irion had placed in a trade journal. Rob McCullough was a college art major whose work in sculpture attracted him to relief carving. Alan Anderson specializes in antique restoration, Kendl Monn in antique paint restoration, and Jeffrey Williams works with delicate small pieces such as footstools. Marty Manion heads the department that finishes the furniture with a low gloss that doesn’t hide the grain.
But skill alone doesn’t guarantee beauty. For a handmade piece to be beautiful, the maker’s material must be as good as his craft. Irion Furniture is known for its use of extraordinarily fine woods.
While Chris Arato is Mr. Inside, head cabinetmaker for the company, Lou Irion is Mr. Outside, searching for logs that will produce great boards. “On the commercial market, good wood is scarce,” he explains. “You have to buy it in the log. We set up a network of sources and when someone – a logger, or a tree surgeon – finds a particularly nice big log, he will call us.”
Some of Lou Irion’s sources for unusual logs, particularly maples and walnuts with the tiger grain that was popular in fine early American pieces, are as distant as the hills of Vermont. But, he says, “We are fortunate in this area right now, although what is happening is sad. Big old estates are being divided for the first time. They have tall trees and although some will be left, most will be cut. Those trees are a source of excellent furniture logs.
“We concentrate on large diameter logs, take them to the sawmill, cut them, dry them ourselves, number them so the boards can be kept together. That way, when we go to make, say, a dining room table, the boards match. When you consider that cherry, for instance, can range from a pale shade to a dark red, it’s ideal to use boards from the same tree for consistent color.
“When the wood is good, it only requires a light finishing. The natural beauty comes through.
“We work primarily in walnut, cherry and tiger maple, and are starting to use a little curly birch,” Irion says.
“We use a little mahogany, but the quality of today’s mahogany is not nearly as good as the eighteenth-century wood that came out of Cuba and Santo Domingo. It was such a rich coppery brown wood that it didn’t even need much finishing.
“Tiger maple is hard, really difficult to work with, a major headache, but when the piece is done it is so beautiful it’s worth all the trouble. There’s such life in it.”
Tiger maple trees can’t be planted. The curious grain called tiger maple stripe is a freak of nature; finding a tree that has it is serendipitous. “You can find figure in every species but the tiger stripe is most predominant in maple,” Irion says. “It is beautiful because it is natural, not applied. If it were applied, it would be ostentatious, but the natural grain is not.”
Early craftsmen, too, emphasized the quality of their materials. One 1824 carpenter, for example, advertised that he had “just received a very handsome assortment of mahogany and bird-eye maple which he has selected from the best lumber years in Philadelphia and is now working up into furniture.”
At Irion’s, there’s no such working-up until a customer places an order. Nothing is kept in stock. Sometimes a customer wants an antique dining chair copied, a frequent request since few entire sets of chairs have survived the centuries intact. On the other hand, the customer may have nothing to copy, but wants a secretary desk, block front chest, dining table, blanket chest, bed, or one of the other pieces that Irion makes.
Out come the photo albums bulging with several hundred pictures of furniture the company has made for others in the past.
“We try to stay close to eighteenth century design,” Irion says, “but on the other hand, we’re not adamant about making each piece a copy of an early one. For instance, we might take a particularly nice detail from one tall chest and another from a different piece and include both in the tall chest we’re making.”
What his company is best known for is its reproductions of the furniture of Chester County. “The early furniture of Chester County is Quaker furniture,” Irion explains. “The Quakers were English, business people, often prosperous. They didn’t believe it was wrong to have money but at the same time, they didn’t believe in ostentation. So they would take the high style designs of Philadelphia and simplify them. To me, the result is some of the nicest furniture ever made.”
Characteristics of Chester County, according to Charles Dorman, retired senior museum curator of Independence National Historical Park, include “fine lines, beautiful wood, and honest construction.” Dorman, whose Philadelphia home is filled with examples of Delaware and Pennsylvania craftsmanship, has long been admirer of the Chester County style.
Furniture made by the eighteenth-century craftsmen of Chester County, Pennsylvania, was as solid as the Moores, Smiths, and Ways who were among its makers. In the tradition of the Quakers for whose homes it was destined, the furniture was “of the best sort but plain.”
Many of the region’s rural, conservative, middle-class Quaker families resisted the westward movement of their era, their names appearing on the tax rolls of the same townships for generations. Along with the old family names, the old family furniture remained in Chester County, even as that 1682 tract was divided, the western portion becoming Lancaster County and the Southeast splitting off to become Delaware County. (Chester County now lies west of Philadelphia and east of Lancaster.)
The result is that even today, the area retains a treasure of locally made pieces: chests of drawers, tall case clocks, drop-leaf tables, clothes presses, secretary desks, candle stands, bedsteads, chairs, and any number of small pieces such as looking glasses, spice boxes, and document boxes.
But for those who were not lucky enough to inherit the real thing, Irion Furniture offers a substitute. Perhaps the customer wants a tall case clock made of tiger maple. Once the design is selected and a deposit given, Irion chooses the boards from which it will be made. Then the cabinetmakers take over. There’s no formula to how work is assigned. If the design is new, different, or unusually challenging, changes are it will go to Arato, a craftsman so respected by his co-workers that they call him “the pope.”
“We have six or seven excellent cabinetmakers here,” Arato says, “and we try to keep their work varied for their education and enjoyment. We’ll talk it over among ourselves and decide who’ll do which piece. Virtually the whole piece will be done by one cabinetmakers, although a newer man may work on parts such as legs, and the more difficult carving may come to me or Rob McCullough, who is especially skilled at that.”
While a piece of furniture is being made, customers sometimes drop by to watch its development. They get to watch for a long time. Consider, for instance, one piece in the Irion repertoire: a secretary-desk with twenty-seven-hand-dovetailed drawers. Cabinetmaker Glen Hicks, from an old Quaker family that also included “Peaceable Kingdom” painter Edward Hicks, filled four consecutive orders for the piece. Each took 300 hours, for a total of half a year of forty-hour weeks. After completing them, Hicks switched to chairs for a while, until he could stop making dovetails in his sleep.
While the cabinetmakers are working, they’re studying. “We learn all we can from the antiques that come in for reproduction or for restoration,” Irion says. “They can tell us a lot about how those old guys did things.”
Irion, Arato, and the others examine antiques, study pieces in museums, attend auctions, and interrogate persons who are familiar with the old Chester County pieces. Whenever possible, they photograph or sketch details, even make rubbings or lightweight castings. “We also have a lot of knowledgeable customers and antique dealer friends who will drop in to look at something we’re doing and give us helpful criticism,” Irion says. “They’ll tell us if an ear is wrong or a molding inaccurate.”
Louis Irion III is not a Quaker, but holds views that are not far removed from theirs. “I’m from a no-frills family,” he says. His father, Louis A. Irion Jr., is a fine cabinetmaker who for many years owned the Berwyn Furniture Shop near Philadelphia. From him, Louis III inherited a down-to-earthy attitude about his work.
“This is a craft, not an art,” Louis III emphasizes. “Chris and I like to make good furniture and stay out of the limelight. We really don’t think that what we do is extraordinary. We know we do good work, but thousands of honest craftsmen have done it before us and they didn’t make a big deal of it. It’s just a matter of doing a job right.”
It’s an anachronistic attitude, but the men of Irion Company can live with it.