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William D. Jenkins is scurrying to build a few Windsor chairs. The past of the nation depends upon them.
"I need 35 sack-backs by Jan. 1 for the Continental Congress. I've called all my customers and asked them if they'd like their chairs to be in the 'John Adams' movie," Jenkins said.
With loaners from his customers and other chair-makers, plus others from every room of his old family home at Montross, Jenkins is up to about two dozen.
Not to worry. He says he's got plenty of time to build about a dozen more before the Founding Fathers solemnly rise from them to sign the Declaration of Independence.
On the other hand, he's facing a Nov. 1 deadline to finish up other chairs and benches commissioned by the movie's makers, including replicas of John Adams' favorite hoop-back Windsor and Thomas Jefferson's swivel chair.
Filming of "John Adams" was scheduled to start next month in Richmond and Williamsburg. But delays in finding an actor to play the title role have reportedly pushed filming back to February.
Playtone, a California film company partly owned by actor Tom Hanks, is producing the 11-part HBO miniseries based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.
The Virginia Film Office expects the production to sprinkle $60 million around the state before the filming ends next spring.
Five or six thousand of those dollars will fall Jenkins' way, he said. It's the biggest order yet for the 64-year-old retired airline pilot who started making the classic chairs in 2002.
Sturdy, light and comfortable, the design first appeared in the English town of Windsor in the early 18th century. Windsor Castle royalty made the chairs popular, Jenkins said.
A royal governor brought some to Pennsylvania. American craftsmen soon stripped the design of European pretension and started turning them out by the thousands all over the Colonies.
Regional craftsmen developed different styles. Jenkins makes and sells many of them: Philadelphia low-backs, New York bow-backs and Boston and Nantucket fan-backs, plus comb-backs, continuous-arms and sack-backs--so named because feed bags were often draped over the curved open back in cold weather.
Jenkins said his fascination with old tools and a prompt from his wife Lucylin put him in the chair business
"I inherited some ladder-back dining-room chairs from my aunt, but Lucylin wanted more comfortable chairs. I had also started a collection of old tools and my father gave me some more.
"I had also read Michael Dunbar's books on old tools and one about how to make Windsor chairs. I went to New Hampshire to take Dunbar's class and that's when I made my first sack-back," he said.
Jenkins sells his chairs at craft fairs, community market days and bluegrass and wine festivals. Prices range from $140 for a Windsor stool to $1,500 for a three-person settee.
But a commercial disappointment led to his Hollywood windfall, he said.
Last year, he rented space in a Kilmarnock antiques mall and put a dozen chairs on display. But after seven months he had sold only one child's chair, he said.
He was removing his chairs from the mall in June when the manager persuaded him to leave a couple in a gallery of paintings. A week later, Kathy Lucas called him at home.
Lucas told him she was the set decorator for "John Adams." She said she had been touring Northern Neck antiques shops for props for the movie. She had seen his chairs in Kilmarnock and wanted to see more as soon as possible.
"I thought it was a hoax," Jenkins said.
But when Lucas showed up in Montross, Jenkins said, "She walked around the house and said, 'I want this one and that one and that one over there.'"
She bought three chairs, two stools and a settee. She and Jenkins signed a rental contract for the Continental Congress chairs. And she called back a day or two later to say she also needed replicas of the Adams and Jefferson chairs.
"Bill's chairs are beautiful pieces of art. They're perfect for our movie," Lucas said. Jenkins' hoop-back will grace the set in scenes of Adams' study at his home in Braintree, Mass., she said.
The movie work is piling lathe dust and shavings on the floors of an old smokehouse and a dairy where Jenkins builds his chairs at Locust Farm.
"Electricity is my apprentice," said Jenkins, who uses it to power a lathe to turn maple into legs and stretchers. He also uses a power jigsaw to shape the chairs' pine seats and a steam box made of PVC pipe to bend oak from a tree on the farm into arms and hoops for the chairs.
From then on, the tools in his hands--adzes, drawknives, spokeshaves, scorpers, travishers, compass planes, veiners, knives, chisels and hammers--are the same kind that craftsmen used to build the chairs in 1776.
Modern marketing has changed Jenkins' style. He said he sanded away all the tool marks from the first Windsor chairs he built.
"I've still got them," he said. "They didn't look rustic enough." Now he leaves the tool marks on.
"In today's market, if you're going to sell handmade products, they should look like handmade products," he said.
It was precisely that quality that caught the set decorator's eye.
"Nowadays, most Windsor chairs look machine-made, but Jenkins' chairs have the look of a true craftsman," Lucas said.
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