Folk Art Display Case Dedicated to Local Woodsman

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The Museum, now home to a rich collection of logging equipment used in the Rangeley region as well as the nineteen Alden Grant paintings of logging in the Kennebago area, is seeking to increase its holdings of traditional art related to work in the woods. "The display case will help us show our visitors what we have," said Logging Museum founder and president, Rodney Richard, son of William Richard.

Dedicating the folk art display case to Mr. William Richard is especially appropriate since he has been recognized as a gifted carver of double fan towers that are made by splitting pieces of white cedar with an assortment of knives. Mr. Richard's delicate fan towers are mind-tricking sculptures with two fans perched on a vertical shaft that supports balls-in-cages. People have compared them to birds in flight, dancers' skirts, and doves trying to fly away with a church steeple. All of these images contain the ideas of movement, flights of the imagination, and trying the impossible -- all the more fitting when one thinks about Mr. Richard's life.

Born into Acadian culture in 1900 near Rogersville, New Brunswick, Mr. Richard grew up sixth in a family of eleven children. His mother, Appoline Pitre (Pauline Peters) was born in Rustico, Prince Edward Island. His father, Emmanuel, was from Richibucto, New Brunswick. And his grandfather -- Hypotite Richard -- from the Shediac area, belonged to the seventh generation of Richards in North America, all of whom were descended from Michel Richard, born in France in 1630 -- most likely a peasant from the Loudun area of Poitou, just south of Angers. Michel Richard immigrated to Port Royal, Acadia; and, in 1675, he married Madeleine Blanchard, thirteen years his junior.

William's great-great-great grandfather Jean Baptiste Richard (1718-96) and his wife Franoise Girouard managed to stay in what is now New Brunswick when the British, in 1755, did their best to rid Maritime Canada of its French settlers forever. The couple escaped deportation by taking refuge further west, either at Bouctouche or at Richibucto.

Mr. William Richard grew up in Saint Peters, working on his father's farm and at various woods jobs along the Miramichi. With his cousin, he left home in 1921 for the logging camps of northwestern Maine with one small black cardboard suitcase, no English, and just enough money to get him to the line at Vanceboro. But he brought with him woodworking and storytelling traditions that helped him establish a three-generation family of loggers and woodcarvers.

He landed a woods job with his brother Martin and other fellow New Brunswick men at the Gray Farm near Smalls Falls, just north of Phillips. In 1926 he married Abbie Calden, and they raised their family together: Allen, of Mexico, Maine; Rodney, of Rangeley; and Mortimer, Lewis, and Winona (now, Davenport) of Phillips.

Mr. Richard learned to make the fans in an unconventional way. It was 1933, during the Depression, and to make ends meet, Mr. Richard, like many area woodsmen and farmers, made and sold beer and wine to add to the dollar a cord they got for chopping wood. For his efforts, he was arrested by Sheriff Leavitt and slapped into the Franklin County Jail in Farmington. There he met fellow French woodsman, Raymond Bolduc who taught Mr. Richard how to make the fan towers, a traditional art form known especially in Finland, Sweden, and Russia, and once made throughout the boundary area of the United States and Canada by woodsmen in winter logging camps.

Busy with work and family, Mr. Richard stopped making fans until his son Rodney and his grandson Rodney, Jr. -- both carvers as well -- urged him to begin again in 1975. Since then, the three-generation family has appeared at festivals throughout New England and twice at the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife in Washington DC.

When Mr. William Richard passed away in 1993, the family asked that donations be made to either Eastman Park in Phillips or the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum. It is the contributions to the Museum's William Richard Memorial Fund that have made possible the purchase of the display case that eventually will house representative examples of all of Mr. Richard's work, including crosses, walking canes, ax handles, peach pits, miniature woods tools, gumboxes, and, of course, the fan towers. "I'd like to set up this exhibit to show my father's art work," Rodney Richard explained, "because the double fan towers are something all together unusual. They're very symmetrical -- perfect. The workmanship in them is something to see; they're so very well done." And as to why the fans are in a logging museum, Richard answers, "Where else could you put them that would be more appropriate? It was his life's work -- being a woodsman -- and the fans are wood. It's most fitting to have his art in a museum that has the appreciation for wood that we have."

--Peggy Yocom