Celebrating The Work Of The Wagon Master

By Shannon Hicks

Willard Heimstra, who goes by the nickname the Wagon Master, is being honored with an exhibition of his works at C.H. Booth Library in Newtown this month. Mr Heimstra was for years a local resident and even a longtime member of Newtown Hunt Club. Today he makes his home in Monroe, where the buggies now on display in Newtown were previously exhibited.

Mr Heimstra was in Newtown this week to set up the display of his work, which can be seen in display cases inside and just outside the children’s department. The exhibition offers Amish-style model wagons, all hand made by Mr Heimstra. There is a stagecoach with a four-hitch team, a funeral wagon, a milk wagon, a surrey with four riders, and even what Mr Heimstra calls his “John Wayne wagon” — an old-fashioned courting wagon similar to the one the Duke’s character rode in with Maureen O’Hara in the film The Quiet Man.

Mr Heimstra recently moved back into the area after having lived just outside Amish country in Pennsylvania for a number of years. It was while living in Chambersburg, Penn., about 2½ hours from Lancaster County, otherwise known as Pennsylvania Dutch Country, that he began working on his model wagons.

The first wagons were produced about ten years ago, and many were built as commissions. The funeral wagon on view at the library was a commission for a lady whose grandfather owned a funeral parlor, Mr Heimstra said this week. But after placing the order with the Wagon Master, the woman disappeared. So the funeral wagon remains in Mr Heimstra’s collection.

The buggies are all built with poplar wood, the horses’ reins are leather, and most of the manes on the horses are from women’s hair.

“I tried horse hair at first,” Mr Heimstra said on Tuesday, “but it wouldn’t stay bent. Women’s hair is softer.”

The funeral wagon is one of the wagons that remains in the memory of Fred Danowski, the adult services librarian at Monroe Public Library. In addition to handling reference questions and programming at the library, Mr Danowski’s job also including coordinating the institution’s art exhibitions.

“I thought they were all amazing,” Mr Danowski said Wednesday afternoon. “The funeral wagon in particular, the way the hair fell for the horses’ manes. Just amazing.”

Even the small wooden figures of men and women are painted simply, in keeping with the ideals of the Amish. The public “seemed to really love” the models when they were on view in Monroe, Mr Danowski added.

The models average about two feet in length by eight or so inches high. They will be on view at the Newtown library, says Mr Heimstra, “a month or so anyway.”

The Amish are a religious group who live in settlements in 22 states and Ontario, Canada. The oldest group of Old Order Amish, composed of about 16,000 to 18,000 people, lives in Lancaster County, so Mr Heimstra’s models were based on the wagons of the oldest sect of the Amish.