 When Charles Durfee ’64 decided to move to Maine and work with wood, his parents acted as if he’d jumped on a wagon train to colonize the wild unknown.
Though Durfee had grown up a few hours away, in Western Massachusetts, the Durfees’ world was the world of academe. His father taught math at Mount Holyoke College, as does his brother Alan ’61, and another sibling, William ’72, is an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota.
“I was programmed to teach,” jokes Durfee, now a fine cabinet- and furnituremaker, “but I was the mutant in the family, the left-handed one who didn’t get a Ph.D. To my folks, going Down East to build boats didn’t seem like a career decision, it seemed like a brave new world; I was almost adopting a different culture and value set. When they grew to understand it better, they were delighted with my career choice.”
Apart from building toy boats when he was 8, Durfee did not pick up his tools with purpose until after he had served in Vietnam and dropped out of a doctoral program in history at George Washington University. His first work was on house construction crews on Cape Cod and in New Hampshire.
“I liked being near the ocean; I liked sailing; I liked the wilderness. I liked working with my hands to make something tangible. I didn’t like traffic jams and I didn’t like standing in line,” says Durfee, who in 1975 joined a training program in wooden boat building affiliated with a maritime museum in Bath, Maine.
For three years he worked in boatyards, but more and more often he was asked to do projects on his own—not just on boats, but also on kitchens and stairways and doors. The transition to cabinetmaking came smoothly.
“One day,” he says, “I just realized I hadn’t built a boat in a long time.”
So he went out and built a furniture-making shop behind his house in Woolwich, Maine, within the scent of the ocean and the sound of a lake where loons cry out.
Durfee, whose wife, Jennifer, and children, Willa, 13, and Taylor, 10, enjoy visiting the shop, refers to the place as his haven.
But it’s a productive haven where home furnishings finely crafted from North American hardwoods take shape under his skilled hands. He designs most of what he makes, working in traditional styles such as Shaker and colonial.
During the Andover Bulletin’s summer visit, he was putting
finishing touches on a Federal-style sideboard whose bowed front was made from quarter-sawn cherry to show the wood’s unusual grain. Priced at $6,000, the piece, commissioned by local home builders, had taken him two months to make. Earlier, he had created an oval cherry table with quarter-sawn apron for the same couple, who had learned about his work from a mutual friend.
Though he advertises and has a Web site (www.cdurfee.com), he says the word-of-mouth scenario is more common. People tell people who tell people who somehow find their way to Durfee’s little country road.
And the brave new world?
Durfee finds a sense of community in Maine that he was missing in Massachusetts. Chair of the local school board, soccer coach and country dance fiddler, Durfee knows he’s where he wants to be, doing what he wants to do.
“Every time I come across that bridge from New Hampshire into Kittery, Maine,” he says, “I breathe a sigh of relief.” |
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