Wayne Huff is tired of people thinking he brews beer. Hiff is chief executive officer of Moosehead Manufacturing Company, in the tiny North Woods town of Monson just below Moosehead Lake. The company has nothing to do with the Canadian beer of the same name and everything to do with making high-quality hardwood furniture, and lots of it.
In the world of Maine furniture manufacturing, Mooshead is head and antlers above its fellow woodworkers in size. Its product line contains more than 250 different pieces of traditional country and Shaker-styled furniture, classic, clean-lined home furnishings that have rejuvenated a company once better known for producing the kind of heavy Colonial furniture “your grandmother used to buy”, as Huff puts it.
Yet surprisingly few people in Maine know much about the company – that it operates not one, but two factories (in Monson and nearby Dover-Foxcroft), employs upwards of 250 people, and sells its popular maple and birch furniture throughout the United States and Canada. “I think the people of Maine know less about us than people in New York do,” Hiff observes, somewhat huffily.
But then, that could be said about the Maine furniture industry in general. In 1994, furniture manufacturing was a $110-million industry in the state, according to the latest Maine Department of Labor figures, and employed almost 1,200 people, from tiny one- and two-person shops to major manufacturers such as Moosehead. Granted, the whole business could fit inside the petty cash account of the $3.7-billion paper industry, but in a country where most people assume all furniture is made somewhere in the Carolinas, and in a state where most people associate trees with paper towels rather than china cupboards or bureaus, the size of the Maine furniture industry comes as a revelation to many, even those inside it.
The people of Maine may soon be hearing more. Practically every furniture company in the state is expanding – dramatically, in some cases. Homegrown furniture makers of all sizes are deftly building the state’s reputation for fine furniture, and even those artisans who have no great desire to expand their shops say they are seeing more demand from a public that increasingly equates Maine-made furniture with excellence.

When Huff and his peers talk about Maine furniture, they aren’t talking chipboard and plywood slapped together with staples and a glue gun. They mean solid hardwood- oak and black cherry, hard rock maple and yellow birch, mahogony and teak- held together with dovetails and mortise-and-tenon joints. This is wood that glows when it’s finished and acquires a unique patina from age and use.
The wood is cut, shaped, and sanded into graceful Windsor chairs and imposing boardroom tables, pencil-post beds that harken back to the Revolution and graceful bureaus that will be handed down to future generations. Maine furniture firms produce sturdy bunk beds for growing families and comfortable rockers for those whose families are grown and gone. Indeed, if it can be made from wood, from library carousels to coatracks to side tables, it is made in Maine by people who know their way around the woodshop.
And these are people who love wood.
Furniture maker Christian Becksvoort, of New Gloucester, doesn’t stroke the side of his signature fifteen-drawer cherrywood cabinet so much as he caresses it, his fingertips able to tell at a touch the grit of the sandpaper that last smoothed the wood’s surface. He delights in the special touches- the secret compartments that customers love to find in his custom sewing desks, the silver dollar tucked away inside the woodwork of every major piece both for luck and to identify the year in which it was made.

Becksvoort, a tall man with a slow smile and an open face fringed with a dark beard, remembers delivering a piece of his custom furniture to a client on Long Island. “He introduced me to his friends as ‘my cabinetmaker from Maine’, and everyone understood what that meant, like saying ‘my banker from Zurich’,” Becksvoort recalls. “It has a certain cachet that you don’t find when you say ‘my cabinetmaker from New Jersey’.”
It’s a cachet based on Maine’s long reputation for creating practical yet beautiful things from wood, especially boats and sailing ships. Maine towns of two centuries ago often supported local cabinetmakers and housewrights who had learned their craft as shipbuilders. Indeed, today Weatherend Estate Furniture, of Rockland, emphasizes that its top-of-the-line outdoor furniture is constructed using traditional boatbuilding techniques and finishes.
“The Maine label definitely means something to consumers,” explains Weatherend president Gil Harper, whose line of stylish yet sturdy teak and mahogony chairs, settees, and tables is based on pieces designed for the local Weatherend estate in the early 1900’s. Although designed as outdoor pieces- Mainers might recognize it as the fresh-air furniture of choice at Disney World and EuroDisney- Weatherend pieces also have found homes in university libraries and corporate headquarters all over the country. “I think our customers find a high degree of comfort that they are buying a product made by people who take pride in what they do and who will be there to back up what they make.”
That reputation is part of the reason that large companies such as Thomas Moser Cabinetmaker, in Auburn, and Moosehead manufacturing farther north are confidently predicting major growth. Moser chief executive Harry Fraser expects to take the business from its current $7 million in annual sales to $20 million within four years, while Moosehead’s Huff predicts the company will double its current sales to $25 million within the next five years.
(Coincidentally, both Moser and Moosehead are going through major generational transitions. Thomas Moser, the founder and guiding force behind his company’s growth from an empty Grange hall in New Gloucester in 1973 to a modern factory employing some 100 people, is stepping back as his four sons and a daughter-in-law gradually move into senior management positions. The family deliberately brought in an outside CEO, Harry Fraser, to oversee the transition, which they foresee as a five-to-ten-year process. Moosehead Manufacturing, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, was founded when the late brothers John and Tolford Durham bought an abandoned slate mill in Monson just after World War II. The mill included some woodworking equipment, and the brothers used it to go into the furniture business. Huff joined the firm in 1964 as the son-in-law of Tolford Durham, and now his son Tim, is company engineer. John Durham’s grandson, John Wentworth, is executive vice president and production manager, and his brother, Jim Wentworth, is vice president for purchasing and maintenance.)
Growth hasn’t been limited only to the larger firms. Huston and Company, with seven employees, is developing a successful niche building furniture for corporate and institutional clients as well as for its traditional residential customers. The company recently relocated to Kennebunkport after outgrowing its original shop space in Poland Springs, and owners William Huston and Mia Millefoglie have opened their first showroom. Weatherend has emerged from a major reorganization and the recent purchase of the firm by longtime manager Harper with plans to introduce two new product lines in the next two years.Other small furniture-making firms around the state also report a growing demand for their work that has them making expansion plans.

“I get the sense from people stopping at the shop that Maine is getting a reputation for fine furniture, and I think deservedly so,” comments William Evens, who specializes in building and repairing high-end veneer furniture at his shop in Waldoboro. “There are a lot of really good furniture makers here, and the fact is attracting a good deal of attention outside Maine.”
Evans, a Philadelphia native, moved to his mother’s home state nine years ago after serving an eight-year apprenticeship with a master European cabinetmaker in Toronto. His work does much to restore credibility to veneer, a construction style that involves gluing a thin sheet – one-twenty-eighth of an inch thick – of very high-quality or exotic wood over a base of more stable but less-costly wood. The technique fell into disfavor when mass-market manufacturers turned out huge quantities of poorly made and badly designed veneered furniture in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Some of the finest furniture in history, such as the Louis XIV style, was made with veneer,” he notes. “Besides, I’m very fond of veneer for environmental reasons. You obviously get a lot of mileage from one log.” Evans’ own work leans toward the heavier, more formal, European designs favored by his original tutor, such as his oval dining-room table, crafted from mahogony with bird’s-eye maple inlays, which commands a price of $4,500.
Evans isn’t certain exactly how many individual furniture makers work in Maine, but he can think of twenty to twenty-five in the midcoast area alone. Christian Becksvoort, in New Gloucester, estimates that anywhere from one hundred to two hundred people are making a living by creating fine furniture in small shops throughout the state.
Although large companies use dealers, showrooms, or sales representatives to market their products nationally, the smaller furniture makers around the state have found that the customers aren’t shy about coming to them. Jim Brown, owner of Windsor Chairmakers in Lincolnville Beach, purposely chose a location on coastal Route 1 because he wanted the face-to-face contact with buyers that he would lose if he sold his distinctive, antique-looking chairs and other eighteenth century designs wholesale. “Clients come in with the desire and the hope that they will find someone making furniture with a certain integrity,” he points out.
Brown, who now employs eighteen people in the shop he began nine years ago, has customers from as far away as Texas and California, all because of his site on the state’s busiest highway. “I’m in Maine because I can sell nationwide from Route 1,” he declares. “If I were in Cleveland, I couldn’t do that.”

Handcrafted furniture is, by definition, costly, and even the largest furniture makers in Maine admit that their products are at least in the middle to upper-middle price range. Moser’s signature piece, a continuous arm chair, is tagged at $855, while its matched grain tables can run up to $2,300. Moosehead Manufacturing sells its product wholesale, but president Wayne Huff says a table and four chairs may start at $800 retail and quickly escalate, depending on style and finish, into the $2000 range. Yet they sell as quickly as the company can make and ship them.
“People get tired of mass-produced products, the kind of stuff that comes in a cardboard box from Indonesia or somewhere, that you have to assemble yourself,” Becksvoort observes. “You go into a Wal-mart and look around and you realize that most of the stuff you see will be in a landfill in a year and a half. It’s nice for people to have one or two items in their lives, in their homes, that really say quality.
“Maine has a mystique, a reputation for good workmanship and quality,” Becksvoort says. He specializes in extraordinarily fine furniture made in black cherry. His fifteen-drawer cabinet, for example, contains 180 pieces of wood and 296 dovetails and commands a price of $6,400. His designs favor the simple, clean lines of the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, for whom he does much restoration work.
“I don’t do avant-garde, cutting-edge designs, and there aren’t many furniture makers in Maine that do,” Becksvoort says. “I prefer creating pieces that will still be attractive and useful a century from now. If you look at the gallery furniture of the 1980s, it has fallen by the wayside already. People got tired of it. People haven’t gotten tired of my designs.”
The majority of Maine furniture makers seem to feel the same way. In fact, if there is a “Maine style” in furniture, Shaker furnishings, with their unadorned, timeless lines, are the archetype for the current generation of artisans in the state. Even the major manufacturers ignore the high-style, trendy side of the industry in favor of classic designs that will still be attractive and in demand generations from now.
That thought underlies much of the design and marketing philosophy at Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers in Auburn, and not by accident. "With the hyperconsumerism prevalent today, everything disposable, computers that are obsolete as soon as you buy them, there is a desire in people for something that grounds them in permanence,” explains David Moser, the company’s marketing director. “Maine, for many people, personifies that idea.”
‘I go to California and drive down the Santa Monica freeway, and there is nothing around me of permanence. If you live in Los Angeles, we here in Maine have a very desirable lifestyle. Procuring our product gives the people who live there a piece of that, gives them a grounding in someplace that is real.”
At first glance, Moser seems to be idealizing both Maine and his company’s classic, Shaker-inspired furniture. But his words echo in conversations across the industry. It is a reality that Maine outfits build upon their search to set themselves apart in the public mind from the huge furniture companies that dominate the national market.
“People from all over the country spend millions of dollars every year to visit Maine for a few weeks,” notes Russell Page, marketing director at Moosehead Manufacturing. “We capitalize on that. It’s that image of a small, family-owned furniture manufacturer nestled in the North Woods of Maine.
We have opportunities to move south all the time,” adds Page. “People and towns in the Deep South – Mississippi, Alabama – offer us tax breaks, offer to build anything we want, all kinds of incentives to move down there. But our owners have decided to stay here because they love the state.” Page points out that many of America’s major furniture companies began in New England in the nineteenth century and then moved south and west in search of cheaper wood and labor. The current generation of Maine furniture makers, in contrast, has clearly found plenty of reasons to keep turning out their chests of drawers, chairs, and tables in the northeasternmost corner of the nation.