Rudolph S. Carpenter, Woodworker Extraordinaire

 

Included in the many priceless Lititz items displayed at The Lititz Historical Foundation are two beautiful, inlaid-wood grandfather clocks made by Lititz native Rudolph S. Carpenter. A stone mason by trade, Mr. Carpenter spent most of his free time in a workshop behind his home at 131 N. Cedar Street. His passion was inlaid wood furniture.

He made clocks, chests and tables using more than twenty different kinds of hard wood. Local oak, chestnut, walnut, holly, cherry, and maple were used as well as wood shipped to his workshop from a woodcutter in Germany. His main tool was a simple scroll saw. With his saw he cut as many as 50,000 pieces of wood, in small, intricate, symmetrical shapes to coincide with the finished design he had planned.

His first piece was a 20” x 26” chest which was completed in 1909. It contained approximately 8,000 different pieces of wood. A year later he began making his first grandfather clock using 32,000 different pieces of varied hard wood. He completed the smaller of the two clocks in three years. It is on display at The Lititz Historical Foundation along with a larger clock beautifully crafted with over 50,000 minutely hand-sawed pieces. Carpenter placed each individual color and grain of wood, which fit perfectly, to form a  picture or design. He used the light colored wood from the holly tree to enhance what he was trying to highlight in the finished design.

Some of the wood pieces used in Mr. Carpenter’s work are so small that many are not discernible at first glance. The painstaking craftsmanship becomes more evident at closer inspection and in good lighting. On the lower panel of the largest clock is an inlaid scene featuring a living room with windows, curtains, a table with a parlor light, floor coverings, a picture on the wall, and two people enjoying their surroundings. Incredibly, each person has a different color of hair, and each eyelash is separated from the others above the eyes.

The works of the two clocks, all of wood, also were made by Carpenter. They tick off the time as accurately as any steel-based movement. Each of the wooden cog-wheels is inserted separately to give more strength and durability for long-lasting time keeping. When this large project was completed, Mr. Carpenter said “it will run a century without needing adjustment or repairs”.

Rudolph Carpenter was a stone mason by trade, but nothing made him happier than spending time in his workshop in Lititz designing and fitting together intricate pieces of wood “just right”. Not only was he a master craftsman but also an artist of wood rarely seen in the days before our modern machinery and technology.

Rudolph Carpenter died in 1929 at the age of 69. The Charles E. Krick family of Lititz donated these two beautiful Carpenter clocks to The Lititz Historical Foundation, where they stand proudly representing yet another notable, industrious Lititz native.

 

~ by Charlene VanBrookhoven, LHF Historic Journal, Winter 2011