OLD ROCKIN CHAIRS
Among a few other useful items, Ben Franklin is generally credited with the invention of the rocking chair.
We have Ben bashers about who insist that is not true.
Like the more modern inventor named Thomas Alva Edison, old Ben was always thinking about things which had not been done, or they both liked to taking \on the creation of things which other people said “could not be done.”
I have an idea a number of eager resters may have put curved boards under the legs of chairs long before Ben did., but they were not inventive and failed to realize that what had been done could be a helpful thing to all mankind - go-go gadget to put movement back in sitting still.
We have just one .so called,“Evans” Rocking Chair remaining in our home right now. Others have been shifted down one generation. “Evans” is a local “brand: here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia - chairs made by Walter Evans, his brother Charlie or by their father who had passed the art of chair making an caning down to his two sons. The Evans mark is just beginning to have real money-meaning at area auction points.
It was my good fortune to know both of the Evan' boys for a decade or so. The name was locally said as “Iv-ens” rather than “Ev-ans” - rhyming with “livings” They made many kinds of chairs under what has to be called primitive conditions. They made everything “from scratch”. All materials they obtained themselves from nearby woodlands. - most of which was owned by my father-in-law Irving Driver. He was very close to the boys in many ways, grew up with them, and never understood why the boys insisted on refusing to allow any electricity on their “places. They used wood stove and fire places small homes they did all of their shop work with all of their “machinery” powered solely by foot-pedals turning cogs overhead by means of leather strap connections.
I have to writ e it as being plural - as “places” - because when I came to know the Evans boys they had not spoken to each other for twenty years or more. It happened right after their Dad died, I understand, and folks al;ways told me that it came to an end “of a sudden” when Charlie, the younger of the two up and got married without consulting Walter. Charlie got himself married and that did it.. He moved, with his bride, to a location six or seven miles east near the town of New Hope, Virginia - booted out of the family homestead which had become ever so humble and run down. Charlie fixed up a small place with a workshop, and it too, like the old one,and the new house how no electric power, no inside bathroom, a small tank cistern but no well for the ground would not perk on the hill.. They hauled their water from a creek good mile away. Like Walter they got about at night with the aid of lamps/.They caned chairs as they have always done, by the fireside light.
There was time when I may have scoffed at people who would say one rocker “sat” better than another. I favor our Evans Rocker over others .It does seem to have a better “sit” to it. I'm comfortable and part of it, I suppose, is thinking about the3 troubles those two boys made for each other until their dying days... and Charlie's wife, too. How could, two people, so miserable with life itself make such comfortable, restful, supportive chairs? It may be that, with every piece of furniture they made, they put their entire world of love and energy in the working thereof, since they were unable to share it with humanity in any other way.
A.L.M. January 12, 2004 [c653wds]
