Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 10, 1995 TAG: 9507100137
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FERRUM LENGTH: Long
Why did 19th-century craftsmen fashion doorstops into birds, buggy steps into hearts? Make fireplace implements with greyhounds' faces?
"Just For Fancy," a collection of handmade items currently on exhibit at the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum, is full of such things - workaday objects from a century ago, all topped with a dollop of art.
Art, of course, has been around for millennia. What is so unusual about "Just For Fancy" is that nothing in the exhibit was made simply to be admired.
"The idea was to show things that were used every day," said Roddy Moore, who put the 86-piece exhibit together from private collections and the institute's own holdings.
"Just for Fancy," which continues through next March, features handmade products from Franklin, Floyd, Patrick, Grayson, Carroll, Botetourt, Bedford and Roanoke counties. Included are such highly serviceable items as tables and baskets, quilts, guns and cookie cutters.
All have artistic touches that pose questions for which answers no longer exist.
There are baskets with strips of colored wood, clay pots with painted animals on their sides, elaborate engraving on the stocks of hunting rifles. Here and there is some astonishingly fancy woodwork - including a walking cane that terminates in a hand clutching a cup.
Why?
Who knows?
"It could be a marketing thing," said Moore, who is director of the museum at Ferrum College, concerning all the frills. "It could be a style. It could be an impulse."
Perhaps craftsmen and women of a century or two ago were motivated by the same forces that drive mass production lines today - that is, the need to build a product that will do what it is supposed to do, but also catch the buyer's eye.
After all, there was plenty of competition, even in the 1800s. Blacksmiths once numbered in the hundreds in the Roanoke region. Botetourt County alone listed more than 500 full-time artisans in its 1850 census - among them 94 blacksmiths, 15 cabinet makers, 10 iron casters, five potters and two gunsmiths.
Perhaps, with all those options open to the 19th century shopper, some craftsmen and women sought to set their work apart by adding a little art.
But we don't really know, Moore admits. Local history is not strong on such details.
And by the opening of 20th century, handmade items were fast becoming history - as cheaper factory made goods won the day.
Much that was made by hand a century or two ago has long since disappeared. "We're fortunate that what is surviving, is surviving," Moore said. "Some of this work is almost 200 years old."
It is not clear just how common the "fancy" handmade items were, compared with plainer models, Moore said. Though a number of the "fancy" items still exist -"We had a lot of objects to select from" in the exhibit, Moore said - that might only mean that such items were kept around for their decorative value, while their unadorned counterparts were worn out and discarded.
"Their looks surely helped these treasures survive decades of use," notes Moore in the "Just For Fancy" exhibit guide.
"You wonder, on a lot of these things, if people thought they were producing art," he mused later to a reporter. "A nice patch box (a metal plate on a rifle's stock) with nice engraving - is that art? Or just some nice work by the gunsmith?"
This much is clear: Many of the items in "Just for Fancy" are an antique lover's dream.
For example, there is a cupboard more than seven feet tall, covered with string-turned corners, horizontal and vertical reeding, rope molding and other artistic touches.
But for sheer complexity, it would be tough to top the table made by convict Sidna Allen. Allen was sentenced to 35 years in prison for his role in the infamous Carroll County Courthouse shooting of 1912 - in which several people died, including a judge, a commonwealth's attorney and the county sheriff.
Allen used the down time to make furniture - including this baroque square-topped table made of an alleged 75,000 tiny pieces of interlocking wood.
Pardoned in 1926, Allen took his table and other creations on the road - and charged admission.
There are other tables, including one with an inlaid profile of an Indian chief, its single eye made of mother of pearl, on top.
And more: decorated pots and custard cups, jugs and churns with painted-on rabbits or birds with human faces. Forks made of hickory pine, two foot long tin hinges with graceful half-furled blossoms at the ends. Redware jars glazed with iron, stoneware jars glazed with cobalt and manganese. A banjo with a silver acorn between its tuning pegs.
A quilt in which a different women contributed every square. Each square has a unique design, and is signed and dated by its creator: "Rhoda M. Hanson, Dec. 10 1849"; "Catherine McClintock, Nov. 15, 1850": "Constance Hahn, April 6, 1922."
"The interesting thing in the quilt - they skipped a generation," Moore said. He believes the quilt was packed away for awhile in the latter 1800s, before being rediscovered and finished early in this century.
Then there are the rifles.
Seven muzzle loading, Virginia-made long-barreled rifles, with carved maple stocks, silver inlay, engraving and other artistic touches. Their beauty notwithstanding, the guns were once carried and used, Moore said.
With the exception of the long rifles, nearly everything in "Just For Fancy" looks to the machine-age eye a little bit askew.
In fact, to see the exhibit is to realize how much factory-era standardization has changed our expectations. Things man-made can look a little loopy and imperfect in an increasingly squared-off world.
A couple of hundred years ago, however, nobody cared.
"A jar - if it had a tilt to it - it really didn't matter, if it didn't leak," Moore said.
by CNB