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Each year, the Smithsonian Institution Folk Life Festival celebrates the cultural traditions of communities across the United States and around the world. The Smithsonian annually selects a state to celebrate its cultural traditions, and last year was New Hampshire's turn. As a contributing partner, the Guild participated for two weeks in June and July 1999, demonstrating timber framing techniques to the visitors and raising a 12' x 16' timber frame shed on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Last month, the New Hampshire Council on the Arts and other agencies restaged the New Hampshire exhibition for the state's residents, and Executive Director Joel McCarty was on hand to help with the re-erection of the timber frame building. Here's his report.

I returned from the Indiana windmill project, exchanged dirty laundry for clean, and headed over to central New Hampshire for the restaging of last summer's Smithsonian event. This was an effort on the part of the New Hampshire Council on the Arts and other agencies to bring their state's exhibition back home to show all the New Hampshire folks who had the good sense to forgo the DC heat what they had missed.

It was a reunion of sorts with many friends made in DC. We set up right next door to our friends and fellow Guild members, the Gratons, who resurrected the covered bridge they finished in DC. Unfortunately, the crew from Benson Woodworking who built the horse barn in DC were unable to repeat, but the same timber gate that graced the Mall last summer did reappear.

The Guild was well represented by Bob Phillips (of Homestead Timber Frames), Tom Southworth (of Garland Mill), and Kyle Whitehead and Jeremy Woodliff (of Mink Hill). There was an added bonus of my fabulous middle daughter, Birch, who proved adept at talking the talk, wailing away at the chisels, and convincing more than a few people that timber framing continues to be a viable building technology, environmentally and otherwise.

I spent a good deal of time on stage in well-attended presentations with foresters and other kinds of builders, talking in general and positive terms about the contemporary role of the traditional building crafts. I also answered the same question ("Is that tool sharp?") about 10,000 times.

The Guild brought one of the timber frames back to life, and put on five days of "cut and talk and cut" demos for thousands of people under a variety of weather conditions. The timber frame in question (another 12x16 frame, indistinguishable from my office) was begun in Washington, worked over by the apprentices in Becket, and finally finished (they didn't leave us much) at the fair. It has been sold to a community pre-school in East Alstead, New Hampshire, where it sleeps under a tarp, waiting for its third and final raising on August 19. -- Joel Chandler McCarty

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