Guild Leadership

My first introduction to timber frames was when I was a teenager whose summer jobs included putting up hay and straw (there is a difference) in the lofts of some massive local barns. I didn't really appreciate the work these structures were doing until later in life, probably after I had earned my engineering degree, by steadfastly holding those bales until they could be used, one by one, to bring the animals through what at that time were the snowy months of a Michigan winter.Read more »

I started timber framing after coursework with James Mitchell in log and timberwork at the Island School of Building Arts. After my stint in British Columbia, I went on to schooling at the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) under Bruno Sutter and received a Bachelors of Applied Sciences with a major in timber framing. After graduating, I moved up and down the east coast as a timber framer, and became a journeyworker in the Guild’s Apprenticeship Training Program (ATP). I have spent the last five years working at Trillium Dell and am currently Lead Site Manager.Read more »

I came into the world of timber framing relatively late. Before becoming an engineer I was a classroom teacher, worked in academics, and spent a couple of years in the restaurant business.

I discovered timber framing and converted to carpentry during two years in the Hamptons, then won a fellowship to spend three months in 1990 working with New England–based timber framers. It was an epiphany. This is when I first joined the TFG. As a former mason and drystone waller, I had been working with a (very small) framing company called Carpenter Oak & Woodland in the UK, where we built frames from rough sawn (and only roughly square) green oak, which we scribed together. We did it all by handsaw, or brace and bit, no power tools.

Eric Morley was quite literally born into construction. 54 years ago, the Liberian Mining Company (located in Bomi Hills, Liberia, in western Africa) wished to purchase a new Caterpillar D-8 tractor. There was a trade-in involved, and as is often the case, both parties had not yet reached an agreement as to the trade-in value. Because Bomi Hills was a company town, the mining company also owned the hospital which boasted a new birthing center.Read more »

The Guild has had its hooks in me for over half my life. I would like to try to give back to an organization that has captivated and benefited me, my family, and our small business since the early 1990s. Participating in the notching, raising, and roofing of Ed Levin’s neatly designed pavilion for Franklin Pierce University at the 1993 TFGNA workshop in Rindge, New Hampshire, helped set that hook. On-going involvement in Guild activities, both up close and from afar has kept the hook set.

I’m of course best known for my work in television, as host of “This Old House” on PBS, host and producer of “Renovation Nation” on Discovery’s Planet Green, and host and producer of “Save Our History” on the History Channel.

In the spring of 1990, as a flat broke and professionally-unmoored recent graduate of architecture school, I made the morally dubious decision to sneak into a few sessions at the Timber Framers Guild conference in Troy, NY. I was enthralled with the work I saw, and the attitude toward work and craft expressed by those I met. At some point that weekend, I had a lovely chat with Tedd Benson, who invited me to come see the shop—and became my employer for the next three years. Such was my introduction to the world of timber framing.Read more »