A Museum at Home

This is to certify that Edbury Hatch has served a regular apprenticeship of more than four years with me in the carving business, that he is honest, temperate and industrious . . . A lack of business is the only reason that I do not employ him.

Young Edbury Hatch had just picked the wrong trade. When he was a boy in Newcastle, Me., the town had supported ten busy shipyards and every new vessel needed a carved figurehead. But by 1870, when William Southworth discharged Hatch, business was starting to fall off.

Hatch, armed with his letter of recommendation, stuck with it to the last, then got a job as a night watchman in a hotel. For old times' sake, he whittled while he worked. In the 1890s, he got a notion to carve decorations for his own house and barn. He did them for fun until he died in 1935, lavishing on the job all his training and skill, and using his hundred woodworking tools.

Because his house stayed put and never suffered the hazards of the sea, its ebulliently baroque decorations are among the handful of surviving monuments to maritime woodcarving in the U.S.

According to Art Expert Samuel M. Green (who describes them in the current Magazine of Art), they are also some of the best. A Hatch cannon surmounted by two eagles, a near-life-size horse, and a tree full of carved cats have all disappeared, but a wooden treasure remains. Among the highlights: a gutter spout representing a sea monster and reminiscent of medieval gargoyles (though Hatch never saw any); a side entrance adorned with lion heads, snakes and stars.

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