Harvey Brotman’s career experience has spanned work as a blacksmith, an inn manager, a writer of software manuals, and an IT business owner. For the past 40 or so years, he’s also been a woodworker, at first creating items for his home, and more recently as a juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. As he’s moved toward retirement in his IT work, he’s continued crafting beautiful things from wood, and he officially established his Corner Oaks Woodworking business six years ago. He lives in Lyme, New Hampshire, with his wife Judy and their golden retriever Winston.
I was raised on Long Island in a development filled with split-level houses, and there wasn’t much in the way of woods. There was one little area that hadn’t been developed yet, maybe an acre of woods next to the baseball field. I used to go exploring there with friends and always enjoyed walking among the trees and examining rotting logs that had fallen down. But my first real experience with the outdoors was when I went to college in North Dakota. I’d never seen anything like it. Wide open views as far as the eye could see. And lots of wildlife. More hawks than I’ve seen anywhere else. And fields of wheat and sunflowers. I knew I could never live in a city again.
In 1970, during a summer off from college, I managed the Baldpate Inn in Estes Park, Colorado. The inn was built in 1917, and it was a wonderful place! One of the things I liked to do was build and repair things for the inn using the old workshop there. While cleaning out the workshop I found an old set of wrought iron hinges. Then I found an old book on blacksmithing. I instantly fell in love with a craft I knew nothing about. In the Whole Earth Catalog, I found a school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that taught blacksmithing. I spent six weeks at the school and knew this was my calling. From that start, I went to England and France to continue studying the craft.
When I came back to the States, I worked for the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA) in Cooperstown as their on-site blacksmith. I explained the craft to visitors, taught week-long seminars during the summer, and designed, restored, and created reproductions of historic ironwork for NYSHA and other historical agencies. I also did restoration and reproduction of artifacts.
I enjoyed teaching so much that I decided to set up my own blacksmithing school. I had a friend in Orford, New Hampshire, and I knew about the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. So in 1976 I moved here and found an old Excelsior Mill in Lebanon with space to rent next to a machine shop and a group of woodworkers. From there I went all over and found the equipment I needed to add an additional 6 forges and anvils and started The Brotman Forge. I placed one ad in Mother Earth News, and I was off and running. People came from all over the place. I had students from as far away as Alaska and South Africa.
I had the school from 1976 to 1980. I was hammering hot iron eight hours a day, teaching men and women the craft and enjoying every minute of it. Then I developed a blood vessel disorder that caused my hands to swell up to the size of softballs whenever I wielded a hammer. Sadly, I had to give up the craft that I loved so much.
I started subscribing to Fine Woodworking magazine in 1975 while I was still at NYSHA. I loved reading the articles and watching how another craft related to my own. So it wasn’t a big leap to begin to learn woodworking. The big difference between working with iron and working with wood is that wood moves. It’s always moving, depending on temperature, humidity, how the wood was dried, and many other factors. The trick is to decide how to join and finish the project to minimize any problems down the road.
Every piece of wood is different. Iron is pretty much all the same. With ironwork, you don’t have to worry about grain or anything like that. If something doesn’t work out, you throw it in the scrap pile and you take another piece of iron, and off you go. Another difference is that when you’re working with hot iron, you have to know what you’re going to do before you do it, because you only have about 30 seconds to do the actual forging before it’s too cool to work.
I like woodworking, but it’s so different. There was something magical about blacksmithing. Woodworking is a much more relaxing craft. When you put a finish on it, it just glows. You work with the raw wood, and it looks nice, but when you get a good finish on it, it’s beautiful. People appreciate something that is handmade. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have found two callings in my life that really are meaningful to me.
When we bought our home in 1984, the previous own had named it “Corner Oaks” and had a sign by our driveway. Officially, I guess I started Corner Oaks Woodworking about six years ago. I never named it before then, I just made things for our home and for other people. Then people wanted me to make more and more things. I’ve been doing woodworking in this house for 37 years. I’ve been in Lyme 47 years.
Most of my work now is with hardwoods, some North American species and some exotics. I love the look of walnut when it’s finished even though it can be difficult to work. I also enjoy working with cherry. Both of them are beautiful when finished properly. I find working with clients the most rewarding, tossing ideas back and forth until we come up with a piece that the client is happy with and that I enjoy making. Right now, I’m working with some people who had to cut down a huge, very old maple in the yard and have asked me to create a few things for their family members. It’s a very special project. And I recently made a 9-foot walnut table for a client. It was book-matched, which means if you saw boards out of a log, you take two adjacent boards and you open them up like a book, so the grain mirrors each other. This was just unbelievably beautiful grain.
Most of my wood comes from Baker Lumber in White River Junction. But for this table, my client and I went down to a place called Berkshire Products in Massachusetts. They create slabs from large trees removed from urban areas. They have thousands of slabs and acres of warehouses. You can get lost in the place. We spent three hours there looking at all the slabs. They were just amazing. On the book-matched pieces he chose, the grain was so wild that even after it was completely flat and I brought it down to my shop, it started moving again. I had to hand plane it, then I had to create convex braces on the bottom to keep the table flat. I really had to play with the braces, changing the convex curves so the stress in the table and the braces would equalize each other and finally bring the table down flat.
We have a wonderful golden retriever named Winston. He’s just awesome. He’s 8 ½ and everybody loves him. He’s always the star, wherever we go. When we go to Lou’s in Hanover, we eat outside, and everybody goes gaga. At Baker Lumber, they always forget my name, but they remember his, so my account is under Winston.
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