Rocker of ages

Southern Living, May 1996 by Ford, Gary D

Sometimes I get so tired of a life on the road, I'd like just to stay home and build rocking chairs, like the one in which I now sit. It was made by my great-grandfather Doctor Courtney Ford. Now there was a man who could build a rocker.

In the early 1900s, "Doc" Ford (he was named for a theologian) built hundreds of chairs, rockers, and other furnishings at his Ford Chair Factory in Magnolia, Arkansas. He made this one for another great-grandfather of mine, Samuel Thomas, whose big Victorian farmhouse sat across the train tracks from the small factory. A tall ladder-back, it has aged as gray as an old man's beard, and it creaks comfortably on the concrete porch of my parents' home in Texas, where I now rest in the cool of the evening.

The rocker stands as testimony to Doc's obituary in the Magnolia News, which called him "a maker of good, strong chairs." He would have considered that a compliment, but the labels "artist" or even "craftsman" would be too vain for his modest Baptist soul. He simply built chairs and rockers to withstand weather and time and the tumble of grandchildren.

From the soggy sloughs and forests around Magnolia, he harvested bay and hickory, and shaped raw, wild wood into the simple order of ladder-back chairs and rockers. He mortised the moist bay posts, inserted the rounds and ladders of hickory, and let the bay shrink as it dried until wood held wood with the firmness of cement. He bottomed with rawhide, then later cane, Hong Kong grass, and fiber rush.

He never experimented. He made the same chair and the same rocker over and over, leaving them all unpainted and unsigned. His maker's mark were the finials, finishing them off like two exclamation points, as if to say, There! Another chair finished!"

They say Doc could make six chairs a day and, if enough light was left, grab his squirrel rifle and shoot supper. Mostly, he loved to load up the wagon with his furniture and spend days on the road, selling chairs for $1 and rockers for $3 in nearby towns. "He lived to make a wagon load of chairs, then go on the road to sell them," a son, Adley, later recalled.

The Ford Chair Factory folded in the 1950s, but its products remain in these parts. "There's a Ford chair; there's another Ford rocker," my dad pointed out last summer as he took windshield inventory of front porches during our drive from

Texas to Magnolia for a family reunion. He finds them in area antiques shops too. One dealer, mistaking the chair's simple lines, mislabeled the piece as Shaker.

I like the thought that an ancestor has given others both comfort and heirlooms to pass down. In our family, we cherish the stories about our own chairs and rockers as much as the furniture itself.

There's the one about Archibald Thomas, my great-great-great grandfather, who, with his wife, Rhoda, reared eight children and tamed antebellum frontiers in Georgia and Arkansas. When both were 80, Rhoda died. Six months later, Archibald remarried, this time to a 26-year-old woman, and fathered two more children. One morning, six years into wedded bliss, his young wife found him dead in his rocker in the nursery beside the cradle of their infant.

Here, in my boyhood home in Texas, I can hear my past in the mealtime scrape of the Ford chairs that ring the kitchen table, and in the creak of the little sewing rocker that has lulled generations of Ford babies into naps. I hope those chairs, as well as this one of my two great-grandfathers, find their way to future Ford homes.

Truthfully, I will never stay home and make rockers; I can best build only sentences into stories. But I inherited from Doc both the love of travel and the longing for home. I wish he and Sam were with me now to share the rewards of another journey done: supper; cool breezes; a good, strong rocker; and the gathering of night and family around us.