For our last day with our son Chris, he, our adopted grandson Javier, Betty and I decided to do a road trip through Amish Country in Holmes County, Ohio. Our first stop was to pick up some moving blankets from an Amish tool shop. Chris is moving some furniture to his work apartment in Columbia, South Carolina and needed these blankets
Our second stop was to the Warther Museum in Dover, Ohio. Ernest Warther was a self-taught master carver with just a second-grade education. He originally worked in a factory and later in life carved a complete replica of the factory floor he worked on, including all the men he worked with. He also built a series of cables and pulleys so that all the working machinery moved. In the picture below our tour guide points out the different men and machinery.
Warther's biggest claim to fame was his train carvings. He first started out carving the history of the steam engine from ancient times up to the first true steam train locomotive.
He took his early carvings on tour to the World's Fair in New York. A locomotive company, so impressed with his work commissioned him to carve all the known steam locomotives in existence at that time. He had quit his job at the factory and to help support his family he made kitchen knives. His working day was he worked on his knives until late in the afternoon. He would then play with his children until their bedtimes. He would get about four hours sleep and, waking at two in them morning he would carve for the next five hours. At seven he would have breakfast and then go to work making his kitchen knives.
Here are some of his incredible carvings of locomotives. If the locomotive is brown it's made of walnut. The black locomotives are ebony wood. Anything that's white is carved from ivory. The translucent features are carved abolone. Everything works as it's supposed to. All the wheels and pistons move. Doors and windows open and close. Bells and their clappers swing. You almost believe you can see steam coming out of each locomotive. Train engineers have inspected his locomotives and can find nothing wrong or missing. They are perfect reproductions. Master carvers from Europe have visited the museum and acclaimed his work to be the best they have ever seen.
Detail from the locomotive above.
Detail from the locomotive above.
His wife was a button collector. She arranged her buttons into artistic designs and he framed them. To display her work he built the "button house" next to their home.
Warther loved kids. When he toured with his train carvings he would carry small pieces of wood. Using only 10 specific cuts he would carve a working pair of pliers and give them to all the kids present. The museum estimates he made over 750,000 of these small wood pliers over his lifetime.
Using larger pieces of wood he often carved multiple pliers connected to each other - and the wood was never cut into separate pieces. These are all continuous cuts of the wood to produce these connected pliers.
One day coming home from work he had a vision. He carried this ability to the unbelievable level seen in the photo below. This "tree" of 531 pliers took 31,000 cuts and took from June 24 to August 28, 1913 to complete. It was displayed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. Professors at Case University studied the plier tree and declared that one would have to have an advanced mathematical education to be able to design a block of wood of the correct shape to begin such a project. Mooney replied that he was glad he was told this after he made the tree and not before. He never made another plier tree from that point on.
To display his plier tree he carved the lower part of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He also carved the small implements like the scissors below. All of the pliers below can be closed and return to the original wooden shaped he started with. The pictures doesn't do it justice.
After lunch we drove back to Chris' home, but we stopped on the way at Peggy Sue's Steak & Ribs Restaurant to get some pieces of delicious homemade pie. Betty, Javier and I all got a piece of peanut butter and chocolate pie while Chris got a piece of blueberry crumble pie. They were delicious.
It has been a great visit with Chris. Tomorrow we head to Batavia, Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, to visit with our good friends Bob and Molly. More to come.
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