SAPFM exists because two woodworkers sat at the same table.
Steve Lash and Mickey Callahan met at Colonial Williamsburg’s Working Wood in the 18th Century conference in January 1999 — the first time either had been in a room that large with people who only wanted to talk about how eighteenth-century American furniture was made, and how to make it again. There was no society for that work. By the end of the year there was.
Lash, at the first annual meeting in January 2000:
We spoke at length with a number of you and all expressed amazement that, although there are many different organized groups of interest to woodworkers and furniture makers, the reproduction cabinetmaker still had no special place of his own. There was no venue for communication, and no forum to promote understanding, education, and appreciation of our craft.
Jay Gaynor, at Williamsburg, helped them find out whether the interest was real. Woodwork, Woodshop News, and Fine Woodworking picked up word of the effort, and the poll that came back said a society like this was long overdue. Callahan, the same evening:
We have managed to bring together a broad spectrum of individuals from far and wide, from varied walks of life, individuals who are knitted together by one common thread… the making and preserving of period style furniture. To our knowledge, a gathering of this magnitude and purpose has never been done before.
The steering committee came together fast. Lash, from his 2018 talk at the Cartouche banquet:
Out of the blue Gene Landon called me at home and said he heard what we were doing and could he help. Now, like many of you, I had been a woodworker for my entire life, working alone in my basement shop. When Gene called, I knew we were on to something. We held our first executive Council meeting at Gene’s home.
By September 1999 the first newsletter — two pages — went out announcing the meeting. About a hundred people had responded; roughly two hundred came to the dinner at Williamsburg in January 2000. Lash served as president for eight years.
The Cartouche
The award came together the same weekend, planning that first meeting. Lash, again from 2018:
We decided that after the evening’s speaker, as an extra attraction, the society would present a lifetime achievement award to a furniture maker. We came up with the name simultaneously. Harold Ionson!… Antiques and Fine Art called Harold “the perfectionist’s perfectionist; the last of the Colonial Revival craftsmen who trained in the thirties.” I have a photograph of Harold in my shop, and every time I want to take that shortcut, or not redo that screw-up, I look over at him and think WWHD. What would Harold do?
The trophy was already in the room. Callahan, in 2009:
We all seemed to notice at once the cartouche sitting atop one of Gene’s tall clocks standing nearby. That cartouche… was to become our Heisman Trophy. We had Gene’s carving cast into a mold that is now used to cast the bronze cartouche used in our Cartouche Award every year.
Writing about Ionson in Woodwork in 2001, Glenn Adamson named the thing the Society would have to be:
It needs to do more than fight a holding action against the disappearance of traditional skills. It also needs to champion makers… who are not content to produce their recreations “by the book,” slavishly copying the makers of the past, but who instead use the monuments of furniture history as jumping-off points towards new approaches to woodworking.
The journal
The first American Period Furniture appeared in 2001 — thirty-eight pages. Quentin Wheeler, in the opening editorial:
We are limited only by our collective knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and willingness to pursue leads. The APF will be, we hope, truly and literally a publication by and for period furniture makers.
It runs well past a hundred pages now — the authors makers at the top of the craft, the topics past anything a newsstand woodworking magazine would print. Alongside it, the quarterly Pins & Tales.
Face to face
The record matters, but the Society lives when members are in a room together. A Winterthur tour organized in July 2001 filled within two hours of being announced. The Ohio River Valley chapter, started by David Conley, was the first to meet, in May 2004. There are twenty-two now.
For years the annual meeting and the Cartouche banquet were held each January, at the Williamsburg conference where the Society began; mid-year conferences started in the summer of 2002. Today SAPFM gathers once a year at its own conference, where the Cartouche Award is presented.
The next twenty-five years
SAPFM is still all-volunteer, still dependent on makers — amateur and professional — stepping up. Callahan, on where it started:
Over a few beers at the Williamsburg Lodge, Steve and I began our friendship, and with other furniture makers at the Lodge, hatched the idea for what is now SAPFM.
The knowledge this craft runs on still lives mostly in people, and not enough of it gets written down. Gathering it — at meetings, at the conference, in the journal and the magazine — is the work, and it isn’t finished.
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