Period Windsors

5/24/14 – St. Croix Falls, WI
As seen on the Pioneer Press

When Jim Van Hoven’s building in St. Croix Falls, Wis., was a restaurant, cleaning up after hours meant vacuuming up potato chips. These days, at the Woodshop Featuring Windsor Chairs, Van Hoven cleans up wood chips.

His building serves as gallery and workshop for the 14 styles of Windsor chairs and accessory items he crafts.

The Woodshop’s front door opens to the rich smell of wood: hard maple and birch for turnings; white pine for chair seats; and red or white oak or occasionally hickory for chair spindles and bent wood parts.

Jim Van Hoven works on saddling a chair seat with a compass plane in the workshop at The Woodshop in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin on Thursday, May 22, 2014. His building serves as a gallery and workshop for the 14 different styles of Windsor chairs and accessory items he crafts. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

“Maple turns like butter, and I use it for its ease of turning,” Van Hoven said. “White pine is a stable, easily carved wood, so I use it for seats. It’s a softer sit. The spindles of oak or hickory are because you want a long, fibered wood for bending.”

Van Hoven’s sense for wood and his skill have made him one of only seven Windsor chair craftsmen to be voted for inclusion in the Early American Life Directory of Traditional American Crafts.

On display in the front gallery are examples of various Van Hoven chairs, ranging from sack-back armchairs to Van Hoven’s favorite, a rocking chair designed so the user cannot fall over backward. There are ancient machining tools on display, as well.

Step a bit farther, and you can see the master at work.

“I use old hand tools because that’s how the work was done in the 1740s when Windsor chairs first were created,” Van Hoven said. He can find tools he needs through his membership in the Midwest Tool Collectors Association.

Jim Van Hoven chops a chair seat with an adz at The Woodshop in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin on Thursday, May 22, 2014. His building serves as a gallery and workshop for the 14 different styles of Windsor chairs and accessory items he crafts. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

A 2-inch-thick pine plank begins its journey to becoming a chair seat on the floor, “clamped” by Van Hoven’s feet, with a razor-sharp adze being wielded so Van Hoven’s body mechanics prevent injury. After the first rough gouging, successive shavings with smaller and smaller edge tools create a smooth surface, ready to be hand-drilled to set chair legs and spindle backs. He can hand-carve a chair seat in 20 minutes.

The chair spindles are riven (shaved) in a Van Hoven-created shaving horse that uses a foot-operated clamp to hold the wood steady but which releases it quickly so it can be turned and worked efficiently.

As in the 18th century, the finished chair receives two coats of milk paint — the first perhaps a red, and the second might be black. When finished with linseed oil, the combination gives the wood a warm glow.

Van Hoven produces about 30 chairs a year and has orders backed up six to eight months. Two just-finished chairs are en route to Cleveland, and a child’s chair was just shipped to Kentucky.

Van Hoven began working on furniture as a stress release from his job as a project manager for a Twin Cities heavy-construction company. He started repairing antique furniture in a shop on his property that he first used to build cabinets and doors for his Scandia, Minn., home. Furniture repair led to furniture collecting and then to Windsor chairs.

“This style of chair really intrigued me,” he said. “It’s pure Americana.”

Jim Van Hoven fits arm support on a reproduction of a tenon arm fanback chair in the workshop at The Woodshop in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin on Thursday, May 22, 2014. To the left is an antique tenon arm fanback chair. His building serves as a gallery and workshop for the 14 different styles of Windsor chairs and accessory items he crafts. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

When he relocated to Taylors Falls, he had to find a place to continue making chairs, and the St. Croix Falls building proved to be just right.

Van Hoven is a teacher, too. He is an instructor at a Chisago woodworking school; demonstrates furniture making using old tools at two Chicago folk art shows; demonstrates his craft at Pepin, Wis.’s, “Laura Days”; and makes regular appearances in costume working in a reproduction of a Civil War tent at Decorah, Iowa’s, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum’s Nordic Fest.

In his gallery, Van Hoven will show you the subtle differences between his 1790 Windsor chair and a 1911 Wallace Nutting expertly copied chair. He demonstrates the strength of a tapered chair leg joint by inserting the leg in a block of wood and challenging you to pull it out. It can’t be done.

“People leave and say, ‘Boy, I learned a lot!’ ” he said, “I like that. I have fun doing this!”

Van Hoven has strong beliefs about craftsmanship. “If you make something from a kit, how can you say that it’s really your creation?” he said. “To have ownership of a piece, you need to make all the parts yourself.” He also has strong beliefs about life: “As you get older, you really need to be busier just to maintain yourself,” he said. “Besides, it makes you feel good when someone’s excited about what you’ve done.”