Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019 - 56

KEEPING A 300-YEAR TRADITION ALIVE

Take a Seat

Quiet-loving chairmaker Curtis Buchanan long ago
traded his power tools for a sledgehammer and a drawknife.

By NANCY HENDERSON | Photos by DOUG THOMPSON

n 1983, a couple years after Curtis
Buchanan grew enamored with the
centuries-old woodworking technique of splitting logs to create kitchen implements and furniture, he ran
across a picture of a Windsor chair.
Its perfectly-shaped spindles were
very different from the ladderbacks he'd
grown up with in Kingsport, Tennessee.
"I had never been grabbed by anything
like that before," says the soft-spoken Buchanan, 66, who now lives in Jonesborough. "I was already warming up to the
methods, and then when I saw that chair
... that's when I just dropped everything
else that I was doing."
Today, Buchanan is known as one of
the South's foremost Windsor chairmakers. His work, which was featured in a national PBS show in 2015, is displayed in
the Tennessee State Museum, Southern
Highlands Craft Guild, Tennessee Gover-

BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

Curtis Buchanan got a call from Monticello in 1987, asking him to submit
information about his chairs. He drove there from East Tennessee the next
morning and sold two chairs.

nor's Mansion and Monticello, the home
of Thomas Jefferson. He has also taught in
craft schools around the world.
Still, it wasn't the art of chairmaking,
but the notion that he could earn a living building things with his hands-and
avoid working for someone else-that
propelled him down his life's path. While
studying history in college and planning
to be a professor, in the summer of 1971
he got a job as a carpenter and enjoyed it
so much that he kept at it part-time when
school reconvened, and for the next 10
years.
The usually easygoing Buchanan is
irked by the stereotype of the typical manual laborer as "dumb." "I mean, a good
plumber has to think so spatially and has
to see everything in his head before he
even starts," he says. "And a good auto
mechanic is going to have to be able to
troubleshoot stuff to save you money. He

can't go down 10 rabbit holes before he
finds out what's wrong."
By the time the art of chairmaking
appeared on his radar, Buchanan had already made a few tables and other pieces
of furniture using standard methods. But,
he says, he hated the power tools that
"plugged in and made noise and could cut
your finger off." Building Windsor chairs,
which requires none of that, was more to
his liking.
"It's a real different kind of woodworking," he says. "I don't start with boards
and I don't have a table saw. I don't have
machines and I don't have sanders and
stuff that most people would associate
with a regular woodworking shop. I buy
logs and I split them by hand with sledgehammers and wedges and then I start
working it down with a drawknife or other
hand tools."
Teaching himself how to make the

http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019