Furniture Maker Exhibits At The Library

By Jan Howard

Admirers of furniture of a simple, graceful design and state of the art will be interested in an exhibit of furniture and tools on the second floor of the C.H. Booth Library on Main Street.

The furniture and tools have been supplied by John White, who has been a cabinetmaker, designer, and homebuilder for almost 30 years.

Mr White is a contributing editor and shop manager for Fine Woodworking Magazine, published by Taunton Press in Newtown. In addition to working for the magazine, he makes several commissioned pieces of furniture a year.

Mr White’s woodworking craft is mostly self taught. “I learned some from my father, who was a former boat builder. Mostly I stood around and watched and learned as I went,” he said this week.

After seeing some work by another cabinetmaker, “I said I could do it and went and did it,” he said. “I took the tools I had and started doing it.”

Mr White’s first shop was in Manchester Center, Vt. and later in Rochester, Vt., where he still has a home.

Mr White’s experience includes working for five years in a traditional shop where only hand tools were used for all steps of furniture making. Although he has made furniture in several styles, his expertise and preference is to work in the simple and graceful Shaker style.

 but I have a preference for Shaker style and working in native local wood.”

The large unfinished pine linen cupboard in the exhibit is a reproduction of a Shaker piece, circa 1830. It is made from white pine and poplar and will eventually be painted a medium blue on the exterior and shellacked on the inside. The piece took about two weeks to make.

“It’s pretty straightforward. It’s the best piece I’ve made in a number of years,” Mr White said.

“It’s a simple design but the work is very exacting,” he noted. “It is the state of the art in cabinet making.”

The curved-top chest in the exhibit was made in 1992 from pine and only has an oil finish. The pumpkin color of the chest is the natural color the pine takes on as it ages. No dyes or stains were used on the wood.

Mr White uses no hardware on his furniture creations.

When he isn’t working part-time for the magazine, Mr White is using his evenings and weekends to create his furniture pieces in the new studio he built in Vermont.

A resident of Vermont for 30 years, Mr White was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. He graduated from the Newark College of Engineering, now the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

He enjoys reading books about history and politics. He collects old books on woodworking and craftsmanship that he finds at tag sales and flea markets.

“I’ve viewed the whole process of craftsmen as businesses,” he said. “The Shakers and other cabinetmakers worked in the style of the times. Colonial cabinetmakers reproduced European style furniture.”

Connecticut is a particularly good place to find old tools, he noted.

The exhibit includes several tools, among which are a beam drill, keyhole saw, and tongue and groove plane.     

Mr White recently finished writing a book for Taunton Press about tuning up power tools. “It will probably come out next year,” he said. He also has written technical articles for Fine Woodworking magazine.

“I’m a writer by necessity,” Mr White said. “I’ve learned how to do it, but I still struggle with writing.”

He has been the magazine’s shop manager for two years. “I’m the first real shop manager they had,” he noted.

Mr White’s furniture creations and tools will be on display on the second floor to the left of the circulation desk until mid-November.

Mr White can be reached at Fine Woodworking magazine at 203-426-8171, ext 842, or in Vermont at 802-767-3105.