Rustic Furniture

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Old-Fashioned Stuff

I tried to build a table and chair of my own, but I wasn't old enough to use the good tools and- got no help or encouragement from my elders. I'd seen a few newly made examples for sale at roadside stands. The local old-timers called it "shaky twig furniture" and made it over winter to sell to tourists. I begged the family to please, please get some for our place. They just sniffed: "Why, we threw that old-fashioned stuff out years before you were even born."

They were the World War II generation. Survivors. Winners. Optimists anticipating the second half of the 20th century free of war, famine, and disease, with universal prosperity fueled by cheap, clean atomic energy, where everything would be automated and made of plastic and trimmed in chrome. That winter they had the kitchen modernized, replacing the old sheet-zinc counters with Formica, the enameled-wood Eskimo icebox with a Frigidaire, and the splendid Crawford gas/wood kitchen range with a GE self-cleaning electric.

I stayed at home during the summers after that and returned but once, twenty years later. The old house sported a TV antenna. An oil furnace made the living room fireplace an ornament and there was approving talk of condos going in on the hill just up the shore path. But by then, I'd traded city life for a place in the country with zinc counters, an oak and brass icebox, and a wood-burning range. The homestead was largely furnished with rustic furniture I'd built of birch and maple saplings, sawmill slabs, river snags, and childhood memories.

A History in Twigs

Differences in the way successive generations feel toward rustic furniture reflect more than fashion or historical trends. It is a function of America's evolving attitude toward nature, the environment, and man's role in what we now call global ecology.

The World War II generation was perhaps the last to mirror the Europeans who colonized the New World—embodying the Late-Rennaissance ideal that man's God-given role was to improve on nature, to perfect the natural state. Their ideal was the city as perfected by the ancient Greeks and Romans—the well-ordered repository of all knowledge, culture, and Enlightment. Indeed, the very term "civilization" comes from the Latin word for "city." Life inside the city walls was "civil" and the world beyond the walls was abandoned to the wilderness and howling barbarism—to "uncivil" behavior and chaos.

In the New World, pioneers had to fight their way through a really uncivil wilderness that extended 3,000 miles to the Pacific. Every field, homesite, and road was contested by hostile Indians, wild animals, brutal weather, difficult terrain, and an ocean of trees. Indeed, a cabin, a log bedstead, or rustic chair offered a way to dispose of a few logs. The furniture they made was rustic, not by intent but of necessity, made with primitive tools under primitive conditions. Made not by cabinetmakers but by the people who used it and hewn from the forest that was at once their primary adversary and the provider of food, housing materials, heating fuel, and livelihood.

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