W RITING
IS THE
by Lonn Taylor
H ARD P ART
A
s an historian whose career has
been in museums, I have writ-
ten several books dealing with
aspects of American history. I always
tell people that my kind of writing is 80
percent research and 20 percent writ-
ing and that writing is the hard part.
Right now I am engaged in a project
that perfectly illustrates that formula.
In 1975, a colleague, David Warren,
and I wrote a book about 19th-century
Texas furniture, the kind of pine and
walnut furniture that was made by
small town cabinetmakers before the
railroads brought Sears, Roebuck to
Texas.
Most of it was made to order for
clients who could pay 10 dollars for a
dining table, 15 for a bedstead, 30 for a
wardrobe, and some of it is quite beau-
tiful, especially the pieces made in
Fredericksburg and New Braunfels by
cabinetmakers who were trained in
Germany.
Our book was unimaginatively titled
Texas Furniture, and it was published by
the University of Texas Press. It includ-
ed 220 black-and-white photographs of
furniture and four chapters of text. It
was not exactly a page-turner, but
copies were snapped up by antique
dealers and furniture collectors, and by
1980 it was out of print. If you can find
a copy today it will cost you several
hundred dollars.
David and I went on to pursue other
interests and write other books, and we
pretty much forgot about Texas furni-
ture until we both retired from our
respective museum jobs several years
ago. Then the Center for American
History at the University of Texas at
Austin approached us and suggested
that we do a new edition of the book,
adding examples of Texas furniture
that have come to light in the past 35
years.
We thought that would not be too
difficult, assuming that we got most of
8
Cenizo
it the first time around. It has not
worked out that way.
During the past year and a half we
have driven over most of the state and
examined at least a thousand pieces of
furniture, from which we have selected
about 180 additional items to be
included in the new edition.
Finding the furniture was not as dif-
ficult as we thought it would be; photo-
graphing and recording it has been an
adventure.
In working on the first book, we
relied largely on word-of-mouth to
locate examples. This time we utilized
the e-mail network of the Texas
Historical Commission, which put us in
instant touch with every member of
every historical commission in all of the
254 counties of Texas, and through
them we discovered a whole network of
dealers and furniture collectors that
had grown up since our first book was
published.
Collectors of anything tend to be
slightly peculiar, and furniture collec-
tors are no exception, although most
tend to be peculiar in delightful ways.
I spent an extremely pleasant research
day riding around Fort Worth with
Kelly Young, a Fort Worth oilman with
a significant collection of Texas furni-
ture who spent most of the day talking
not about furniture but about his
adventures as a wildcatter in the 1950s
and his attempts to get a movie made
from a friend’s novel about the oil
business.
One of the major collectors of
Texas furniture is a Huntsville man
who has founded his own religion and
has taken the name Ethicus I. He owns
a second home in the Tuscan hill town
of Gioviano, and his Web site features
a photograph of the main street of
Huntsville
over
the
caption,
“Huntsville, City of Death” beside a
photograph of Gioviano captioned
“Gioviano, City of Life.”
Third Quarter 2009
“A Writer’s Studio” by Avram Dumitrescu. Acrylic on card, 23 1/3 inches by 33 1/3 inches.
Created for the cover of the Writer’s Magazine Guide to Fiction, 2007
Unfortunately, his furniture collec-
tion is in Huntsville.
One of my most productive days
was spent tramping around a farm-
stead outside of Fredericksburg with a
man whose Texas-German family has
lived there since 1848 and has never
thrown anything away. As we proceed-
ed from his ranch-style brick house to a
frame house built in the 1920s to a log
barn built in the 1850s, he showed me
furniture, farm implements, wagons,
trunks of clothing, stacks of German-
language newspapers and assorted
debris that had been accumulating
there for 160 years. One outbuilding
was filled with empty cardboard boxes
whose torn corners had been repaired
with twine by his parents during the
Depression. “Some people say we
Germans are cheap,” he told me.
“That’s not true. We’re frugal. We take
care of things.”
The impulse to take care of things
has preserved as much Texas furniture
as has the impulse to collect it. Some of
our best finds have been pieces that
have been passed down to the descen-
dants of the makers.
A lady in New Braunfels sent me a
photograph of the finest Texas
wardrobe I have ever seen, a huge piece
of walnut furniture nearly 9 feet high,
with thick columns topped by cabbage-
sized finials flanking the doors and an
elaborately carved arrangement of
fruit above them. She said that it had
been
made
by
her
great-