Buchanan County, Missouri 

(Last Updated 08/15/2005 )

 Aged Basket Weaver Dwells in World Untouched by ‘Hard Times’ 

Contributed by Donna Osborn

 

 

C.S. Osborn, a basket maker at Taos, Mo., More Than Half a Century Makes His Trade an Art and Says,  “I don’t Have Any Hard Times Here.  Looks to Me Like People Make Their Own Hard Times.  And Just Talking Hard Times Makes Them”  --Baskets and Homespun Philosophy for All.

 In the little hillside village of Taos, Mo., where the tide of events flows less swiftly and the machine age has penetrated less surely than in larger cities, lives a man who has made an art of his trade.  He is a basket weaver, following the simple and honorable trade of his father and his father’s father, and putting into the weaving of each basket the joy of workmanship and the pride of perfection that has glorified labor in decades past.

 For over half a century he has been plying his trade, weaving an average of one basket a day.  In a nearby city a huge device of iron and steel and electricity weaves some five or six thousand baskets a day.  And yet the baskets made by C. S. Osborn are always in demand.  They seem to have a soul in them, somehow a soul put into them by this worn old man with the white hair and mustache and the thin stooping shoulders and the strong supple hands.  Mr. Osborn though well into his seventy-fifth year, learns daily something new in the art of weaving baskets.

 His baskets, beautiful in the exquisite workmanship with which he fashions them, are designed primarily for use, hard wearing, tearing use; the use of the farmer who fills one with sweet-smelling grain, the use of the farmer’s wife who slips one on her arm and gathers fresh vegetable, the use of the housewife who heaps high in a spacious hamper the clean family wash.

Mr. Osborn, seated in a worn work chair in his shanty workshop, daily receives the homage and the admiration of visitors from the village or curiosity seekers on the road, or the friends and admirers from nearby cities who come to watch his skillful fingers fashion a market basket, and to hear him dish out between ready explanations of how it is done equally ready homemade philosophies or well-pointed jokes.

“There’s kind of a trick to making a basket,” he explains.  “You see, there are thirteen ribs, uprights I call them, but you only start out with twelve.  You split one rib, thus to make an odd number so you can weave around it.  The size and height of a basket depends upon the length of these ribs.”

All of the baskets are woven from strips of wood.  Red elm wood, because it is tough and pliable, is used to fashion the ribs and the interwoven strips, and hackberry wood is used to make the handles.  And every bit of the wood is used in the baskets is gathered by Mr. Osborn from the woods near his home.  From the first shopping of the great elm logs some of them two or three feet thick, to the last wedging of the hackberry handles, every bit of the work is done by Mr. Osborn.  He uses no nails, no steam, no machinery, and only the simplest of tools.  An old fashioned razor, which he has set into a wooden handle, forms the knife  which he uses for whittling the strips of wood into shape.  A rude homemade shaving horse, fashioned from logs now worn slick and shiny from use, is pushed and pulled back by a wooden pedal and is used to aid in shaving the strips to the desired shape.  A twelve-pound hammer is used for pounding the rough logs.  These, together with his skillful fingers and the “natural bend” of the wood, fashion the strong baskets that have found their way from the shanty in Taos to all parts of the United States.

 I don’t beg none of them to but,” Says Mr. Osborn.  “I just make the baskets good and strong, and it seems like I can always sell as many as I can make.  I don’t have any hard times here like everybody is always talking about.  Looks to me like people make their own hard times.  And just talking hard times makes them, I think.  Folks blame the president for the depression.  Plumb foolishness, that’s all.” 

“You wanted to know how I get these little strips from those big logs?  Well, see here, I lay a thick log, still with the bark on it, here on this stump-—makes kind of an anvil—and I pound the log all around with this hammer.  You see, pounding a log like this loosens the ‘growth’, the rings of wood that the tree adds onto itself each year.  A tree grows just so much each year in rings out from the center, and when the log is pounded this way these rings will just slip off one after another.  Didn’t know that, did you?  And then I whittle these rings down into strips, kind of smaller at each end,  most always I do that in the winter time, when I can’t go out and gather wood and it’s too cold here in the shack to work.  I always lay by a supply of  wood in the summer.  You see you can’t use the wood as soon as you cut it.  You have to wait until the sap kind of dries out a little.  And then you have to keep it moist, too.  I sprinkle it every so often to keep it soft and pliable so’s it’ll bend easy.  Wood has to season, just like tobacco does.”

All about the workshop were bundles of wood, stripped and shaped and sprinkled, their sweet scent pervading the room.  Ranged along the walls were stacks of baskets some already finished, some with only the bottoms woven, some the sides not yet attached to the bottoms.  On one side of the rough work table lay a pile of smooth white hackberry wedges waiting to be fitted into the finished baskets as handles. 

“I always work on about fifty baskets at once,” said the basket weaver, pointing out the flat disc-like bottoms already finished.  “I make the bottoms first, then all the sides, and last I put on all the handles.  All the baskets are made double.  That’s to make them twice as strong.” 

“And you can’t tell by looking at a basket where he begins to weave it or where he finishes,” said his wife, who had come down from their little wooden home, which is set farther back from the road than the work house.  “And see here, look at the false bottom he puts on, so’s to keep them from wearing out there.”  She picked up a basket and showed the little extra wedges of wood that are slipped in after the baskets are finished and project down below the sides, forming an extension there for the  basket to rest upon. 

“I put the strongest wood at the bottom,” continued  the man, pointing out several baskets with darker wood along the base and lighter wood at the top.  “The dark wood here is stronger than the light.  The darker wood grows close in towards the center of the log and the lighter grows out more towards the edge.  This red elm is about the best wood in the world for basket weaving.  Never wears out.  No sir!  Why look here at the bottom of this chair.  Wove it myself twenty-five years ago and been sitting in it every day since, and it’s just as good as new!  And bend?  Say, that wood will bend any way you want it to.  Tie knots in it if you want to.  I’ll show you it’ll do it.”  He picked up one of the long strips already cut and shaped.  “Well, I’ll spile this one.”  And with a deft turn of his hand he tied the strip of wood into a slip knot.  “There’s some wood for you!” 

This little old man “lives in a house by the side of the road” in truth, for his workshop stands so close to the road that the shavings of wood, the accumulation of a quarter century, have spilled out the doorway of the shop down in the road.  And back of the shanty is the house where  were raised the six children who have since outgrown it and gone their ways.  But still the basket weaver weaves his baskets, with his doorway thrown open to any passerby who will come in and “set a spell” with him and exchange homely gossip or swap jokes or philosophies.  And the visitor comes away from the wood-scented workshop with a sense of having been for an hour or so in an European village, catching a glimpse of a man who glories in his work. 

His homely philosophy, his gospel of honest work stand as an example to others who have forgotten that such work and such workmanship exists in this age of machinery and mass production.  Day by day as his honestly-made baskets go out into the world they teach the gospel hat honest workmanship pays and that there is truth in the old saying that the world will come to the door of the man who makes the best mousetraps. 

Love of his labor makes each day’s work a thing of joy to Mr. Osborn, and the sense of work well done gives a satisfaction that few find in these days of restlessness and discontent.

Printed in St. Joseph Gazette – Sunday, August 30, 1931

 

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Last Update: 08/15/2005