Look inside this Colerain Township home, site of Windsor chair workshop; property to be auctioned this week

Brian Cunfer remembers his wife, Kathleen, squeezing his leg the first time she laid eyes on an 18th century home on Pumping Station Road.

She didn’t want to tip off the Realtor driving them toward the structure with white stucco walls, he says. But after years of looking for a home with history, she knew this one in Colerain Township would be theirs.

“It just grabbed her,” Cunfer says. “We’ve met other people who own old houses. And they always say the house chose them. And that’s exactly what happened. The house chose us.”

That was in 1998. Now the couple is headed toward Pittsburgh to live near family members there. And the six-fireplace home they are leaving – one of the more recognizable structures in Lancaster County’s southern end – is headed for the auction block at 6 p.m. on June 12.

“That was a surprise,” says Ron Brown, of Northfield Center, Ohio. “I Googled Brian’s address and it comes up on Zillow saying it’s for sale. I thought, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on here?’ ”

Brown showed up at the Pumping Station property this week for a class he’d signed up for on chairmaking. So did Ray Chong, who lives in Vancouver, Canada, and was visiting his son who studies in Philadelphia.

It turns out those two were taking the last class Brian Cunfer will offer from his workshop on a hill above the Pumping Station Road house. That building also serves a studio for Kathleen, an artist. Brian Cunfer has been hooked on making Windsor chairs since he took his first class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina in 1993.

“That was relief from my real-world job,” says Cunfer, who for 30 years worked in construction and built golf courses across the country.

“I would take my vacation and go down to the folk school and make a different chair,” he says. “And that’s when … the instructor said, ‘I only know how to make two or three chairs. You need to go see Curtis.’”

That would be Curtis Buchanan, a master American Windsor chairmaker, who lives in Tennessee. Cunfer studied three times with him and often stops to see him when he heads to the folk school where he himself now teaches twice a year.

Cunfer retired early from construction and made Windsor Chair Shop of Lancaster County his focus. In all, he thinks he’s probably built between 200 and 250 chairs.

“I’m not in it to be a factory,” he says.

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Inside the chair workshop

He does between four to six commissions each year with some of his signature chairs selling for about $1,500. He says about 60 hours goes into each one of those.

For a time, the Cunfers dressed up in Colonial garb and set up chair booths at shows in Williamsburg, Mount Vernon and elsewhere. Business was good.

“One year I made 20 chairs and that about killed me,” he says, adding he enjoyed meeting artistic people at the shows but that the pace became too much. He turned his attention to teaching.

On Tuesday, his two students were each sitting and shaping spindles from green wood while mountains of curled shavings collected around their feet. Cunfer had them using red oak.

“It’s easy and very durable for bending …,” Cunfer says. “The continuous grain is what gives it its strength.”

Seat planks would come next. On American Windsor chairs, seats made in Pennsylvania tended to be poplar. They were typically Eastern white pine if made in New England, he says.

Cunfer likes that there are different vibes.

“Once people came over to America to have the freedom of religion, I think they had the freedom of everything,” he says. “There were a lot of ingenious people and cabinet makers who had different styles.”

It’s easy to tell the difference between Windsor chairs made in Philadelphia and New England, he says.

“From Philadelphia the spindles are straight up and down. Very vernacular,” he says. “I don’t particularly care for that style. I can build them. But I was drawn toward the New England style with the flair and the spindles splayed out. Philadelphia’s are too square …. I like a flowing line.”

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The home’s history

The Cunfers had about 20 Windsor chairs in the house before they started moving out.

Brian Cunfer imagines the original inhabitants would have had some, too, given that an Americanized version of the English Windsor chair was on the scene by the time the roughly 234-year-old home was built.

“I’m sure they would have had some because they were a working man’s chair,” he says. “They were not refined like those English Windsors with the cabriole legs and splat in the back. In fact they started here as a garden chair, really.”

Over the years the Cunfers have gleaned some history about their home’s Irish builder.

“He was an indentured servant from what we have learned,” he says. “He spent some time in the Lancaster jail. And when he got out .. somewhere on this property was a log cabin that he had lived in first.”

The Cunfers looked but never found any remains of the log cabin or the mill that the man supposedly operated somewhere along the Octoraro Creek.

“I believe he got married somewhere along the line and then in 1820 he added the second section of the house,” he says.

The home eventually fell into disrepair and stayed that way for decades. Photographs framed near the front door show a missing roof, boarded and broken windows and crumbling walls. A man who bought it in the 1970s restored it, Cunfer says. He lived there for a time, as did a handful of others since.

“The last person was a lady from England. She was an Olympic skating coach,” he says. “She moved here because her husband had a job here in the states. Eventually she wanted to get back to England and get back into coaching.”

Remembering Colerain

Colerain Township was founded in 1738, settled largely by Irish immigrants who were soon followed by groups of Scots and Scotch-Irish, per the township’s website.

Today, much of the township is covered by treeless fields – many owned by Amish farmers who, per the township website, first arrived in Colerain in 1935.

But there are parts of Colerain that would be hard to farm. Folks who have visited Gnome Countryside – the creation of “gnome man” Richard Humphreys that’s just up the creek from the Cunfers– will likely have a mental image of thick woods, steep paths and massive rocks. The ones along this stretch of the Octoraro are huge and craggy and far pre-date the soon-to-be-auctioned house that was built before George Washington began his second term as president.

Comparing the “circa 1790” written at the roof peak with additional dates on the township website offers a glimpse at just how isolated that structure would have been at its start.

That one-time servant was there roughly 34 years before someone built the first house in what would become Union (believed to be the oldest village in Colerain) and 66 years before a post office was established in Kirkwood, the home’s current postal address.

Kathleen, who is of Scottish descent, has incorporated elements like a Celtic cross near the home. She’s also made good use of the property’s many rocks – stacking little towers called Cairns around the home and some on windowsills.

Brian Cunfer, meantime, has used countless buckets of wood shavings to cover walking paths on some of their 10.3 acres.

They’ll actually have more land but a smaller house near Pittsburgh. He hopes to be set up and teaching there in about a year. Cunfer will also be working with his youngest grandson who lives near Pittsburgh and has expressed an interest in learning the chair craft.

Their future home is a single floor and was built in the 1950s – a relative baby compared to the one they are leaving.

“It’s a lot of upkeep. It was fine 20 years ago but it’s two flights of steps, three floors It’s not friendly for older people. So that I won’t miss,” Cunfer says. “I’m looking forward to a new start.”