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Jess Patterson (1909-1983), dulcimer-maker. Source: \u201cCountry Miles Are Longer Than City Miles\u201d by Craig Evan Boyce (Ward Ritchie Press, 1976). [patterson_jess_022.jpg]<\/p><\/div>Jess Patterson (1909-1983) was a staff member for 30 years at Pine Mountain Settlement School in the 1930s through the 1960s, working as a bus driver, maintenance and farm worker and also as an expert craftsman and sorghum maker at the School.<\/p>\n
JESS PATTERSON Staff: WOODWORKING<\/h3>\n
Throughout his years at the School, Jess performed many and varied tasks around the campus but found his true calling in the wood shop. There he began to apply some of the tools he used as a handyman to constructing furniture and dulcimers. Craig Evan Royce describes in Country Miles Are Longer Than City Miles<\/em> (Authorhouse, 2007) how Patterson’s interest in woodworking began:<\/p>\n As a young man, Jess Patterson worked the coal of Harlan County….to support his young family<\/em>…. It was not until he began to drive the school bus at Pine Mountain Settlement School, a truck with two seats, that his interest in wood began to grow.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Royce quotes Patterson:<\/p>\n I lived down by Little Laurel and would walk three miles to the school and drive the school bus, wait around for the afternoon to drive the bus again, then walk home in the evening. The director said, ‘Jess, why don’t you go up in the wood shop and make something?’ Well, Boone Callahan<\/a> was wood shop boss. I went up and talked with Callahan and I was watching them and I asked if I could learn to make something. They taught me to turn on the lathe and use the tools.<\/em><\/p>\n As Patterson worked for the School, he continued to develop his woodworking skills. His tables, crafted after the large “tilt-top” tables in the Laurel House<\/a> dining room, became much sought after. He was one of the few staff members who could instruct in the craft of hickory chairmaking and hickory caning (weaving strips of hickory bark for the chairs’ seats). He learned the art of “riving” (splitting) boards, which he used to re-shingle Creech (Aunt Sal’s) Cabin<\/a>.<\/p>\n Royce writes that the School “helped tie Jess Patterson to the history of his immediate environment and taught him lessons vital to his creating,” such as the importance of making things that are durable, wasting nothing, and\u00a0appreciating the “beauty of things natural.”<\/p>\nJESS PATTERSON Staff: HIS DULCIMERS<\/h3>\n\n\t\t