Articles

Motoring north from Poughkeepsie, if one bears to the right instead of following the State road, one finds oneself on Violet Avenue. Years ago this was a pleasant dirt road flanked on both sides by miles of greenhouses in which were raised most of the violets for the New York florist trade. Nowadays the air is no longer heavy with their fragrance, the greenhouses have disappeared, the dirt road has been transformed into a hard-surfaced one and the origin of its name is only remembered by the older inhabitants of Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park.

About five miles out on Violet Avenue swings a sign “Val-Kill Lane”, and if you are an adventurous as well as a wise person, you will turn right into this narrow road and follow it to its end.

Between two fields it goes and presently finds itself following the winding of a brook or “kill” as they were called by the early Dutch settlers in colonial times. Its banks are gay with columbine, cardinal flowers, mallows, marsh marigolds, purple loostrife and golden rod, that bring their riot of color with the changing seasons. Over a little bridge and past a swimming pool, the road swings around and up a gentle slope, to reach its goal at the doorstep of a Dutch Colonial stone cottage surrounded by silver birches and tall cedars.

Four women are joint owners of this delightful place. Miss Nancy Cook, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Miss Marion Dickerman and Mrs. Daniel O’Day, and here they have started the Val-Kill Industries, an enterprise that is of absorbing interest to them.

They are manufacturing furniture. Not in the modern way, but furniture fashioned with a craftsmanship, such as was found among cabinet makers of a hundred or more years ago.

The small staff of craftsmen, recruited from Italy and Scandinavia, work with loving care on their products, and a piece of furniture must be perfect in order to pass the scrutiny of the artist, Miss Cook, and be stamped with the Val-Kill hallmark.

A flag walk leads from the cottage to the workshop, half hidden by trees and such a delightful workshop it is---airy, light, with its many windows looking out upon a virgin forest, with occasional glimpses of the rushing brook. The air is filled with the pungent odor of the woods the men are working upon, and it is small wonder that the craftsmen here are a happy and contented lot.

Over the workshop is a laboratory, where the various stains are made from formulae worked out by Miss Cook. Owners of antiques are eager to obtain Val-Kill reproductions as companion pieces of cherished heirlooms handed down by their forebears. Then, too, there are many modern rooms in which adaptations are needed to fit certain spaces, and these are so carefully designed that they have the beauty and color of the antique pieces and a re in perfect harmony with them.

It is a fascinating thing to follow the making of a piece of Val-Kill furniture. First, there is the selection of the wood from the racks of seasoned lumber that fill the storeroom. Next comes the careful measurements that must exactly follow those of the working drawing, then there is the making of the turnings, and the careful fitting of part to part with mortise and tennon joints pinned with wooden pegs. The common and usual way of putting furniture together in these hurried days is with dowels and glue, none of which have any part in the construction of Val-Kill furniture.

When all of this has been completed, the unstained piece is taken to the finishing room. Here glass jars filled with mysterious liquids are on the shelves that line the wall. Jars and bottles of gruesome looking mixtures stand in corners and under work benches. Indeed, the place might be mistaken for the workshop of an alchemist of old were it not for the collection of chairs and tables, chests of drawers, beds and benches piled high awaiting their turn to be stained. This staining process seems almost a ritual, so carefully, almost reverently, is it done---a little color at first, carefully rubbed down, then a second or third coat, but always preserving the beauty of the grain of the wood. The furniture gradually takes on the desired richness of tone. When this is finally satisfactory, the polishing begins. It is done entirely by hand, for hours, until the wood becomes like velvet to the touch, and one is irresistibly reminded of the advertisement for a certain beautifying preparation much in the public eye.

Small wonder that the undertaking of these four women had proved a success for into it they are putting their ideals of honesty, as well as of beauty, and the products of their workshop are finding their way to all parts of the country.

A memorial library has recently been furnished by the Val-Kill shops, as well as the children’s room in the new natural history museum in Buffalo.

Mirrors, fireside benches, and charming little gate-leg and butterfly tea tables are found to be in favor as wedding gifts, and it is a lucky bride who finds herself the owner of three or four pieces of furniture bearing the Val-Kill mark. She has the nucleus of a collection to be handed down to the future generations and prized as the old pieces of the Seventeenth Century are prized by their owners of today.

When you have inspected the workshop, examined some original pieces as well as those being copied from Seventeenth Century and old provincial furniture, meet the workmen: when you have been lured into a stroll through pines, birches and cedars, and perhaps seen a woodchuck or two, or a pheasant or covey of quail, and perhaps taken a plunge in the pool, you will of course want a cup of tea. Over the teacup you will hear plans for further developments, patchwork quilts, hooked rugs, weaving---all of these are in the air as a method of furnishing employment for the women and girls of the surrounding rural district.

And when Nancy Cook goes in to replenish the cookie jar, you will hear from one of her associates that she is really the moving force in all these undertakings. It is she who has studied and searched out the proper methods of construction and done endless research at libraries concerning the finishing of furniture in other countries. It has been her energy, her love of beauty and her ever persistent, unfaltering search for perfection that has given to Val-Kill furniture a real distinction.

As one writer puts it: “It is Miss Cook and Miss Dickerman who live at the cottage all summer and week-ends throughout the year, and it is Nancy Cook, who, with her own enthusiasm for doing things with her hands, has infused that same enthusiasm into the hearts and minds of the men with whom she works and whom she instructs. It is Nancy Cook who works out her own formulas for stains and polishes. And it is Nancy Cook, who, with her own strong, boyish hands, rubs and rubs, and polishes and polishes until a piece of pine or mahogany glows softly and richly and darkly like a jewel.

‘This woman has infused a group of untrained workers with her own love of handicraft, says she never can remember the time when she didn’t love doing things with her hands. ‘I was born on a farm in Massena, new York’, she tells, ‘and I had three brothers. It seems to me that I was doing things with a hammer and saw almost as soon as I could walk. We made our own sleds and tobaggans; we made a hen house of our own and we made a playhouse.’

“Nancy went to Syracuse University and to Pratt Institute and always it was work with the hands in which she specialized. During the war she was one of a unit of twenty young women taken abroad to nurse in English hospitals by Mrs. F. R. Hazard of Syracuse.

“’I nursed for just three days in London’, she says, ‘and then they found out that I could do things with my hands. They sent me to the War Office for a course of three days in making artificial legs. From then till the end of the war I did only that---made artificial legs and splints. I made hundreds of them.’”

The Val-Kill project began with the desire of the four women who later became its owners to build an old Dutch cottage on a favorite picnic site on Val-Kill Lane in the hills along the river. The story goes that once when reiterating their wish to launch a project of this sort, they were started unexpectedly upon the actual realization of it by a gift from Mr. Roosevelt of the land upon which they were standing as a site for the cottage. After plans had been drawn and revised to desired specifications, he again came to the aid of the project by offering to act as contractor for the building of the cottage for a sum considerably less than the prohibitive bids of other contractors. Work on the cottage and shop was undertaken at once and the furniture makers set out in search of workers who would work with the craftsman’s spirit emphasizing beauty and quality rather than speed of production.

In the first three years since the starting of the Val-Kill shop the number of workmen increased from one to eight and during the past year that number has been doubled. It is the purpose of the shop directors to develop eventually a school for craftsmen where young boys and girls of the neighborhood can learn cabinet-making or weaving and where they can find employment without having o go to a city to work. A teacher of weaving has been employed who has classes for girls in the neighborhood and a start has been made with hooked rugs.

“Gradually”’ said Mrs. Roosevelt in discussing the future of Val-Kill, “we want to expand this into as important a department as that of the furniture, for there are as many originalities in old American rug making as there are in old American furniture. Wrought iron work and silver work also come into plan for the future. We hope to make Val-Kill the center for a revival of all of the old industries which were carried out on its very hills.”