Witness Marks

Ben Parry's shop sits on his family's farm outside Oxford, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the Lancaster County line. The farmhouse is 1780s with an 1830s addition, and there is a tunnel under it that once carried enslaved people north as part of the Underground Railroad. He grew up walking the back forty digging old bottles out of the dirt. Some people come to history through books. Ben came to it through the ground under his feet, and then through his hands.

I had a long call with him on Wednesday. I went in with a list of questions about shellac and came out with a page of bench notes and something I have been trying to put into words for a while, about what it actually means to take care of a thing that was made long before you and will be here long after.

How he got here

The path is the trade's path, and it is worth telling because almost nobody walks it anymore. Out of high school he was the laborer on a multi-million-dollar farmhouse restoration down the road, and the job put him in a room with architects and stonemasons who did traditional joinery and hand-laid stone. Two years mixing mud for a mason who specialized in walk-in fireplaces. Four or five years building cabinets and architectural rooms at a shop nearby. Then Paoli, and Frank Rebalsky.

Rebalsky had been head finisher at Irion Company Furniture Makers, the Pennsylvania shop whose reproductions were faithful enough that they took templates from pieces at Winterthur — every board hand-planed, every joint cut by hand. When Irion moved to Christiana, Rebalsky bought the Paoli shop and started an antique-restoration business, and that is where Ben spent the next four or five years learning to finish. He still uses Rebalsky's recipes. Some of the jars on his shelf still carry the man's name. Rebalsky passed away some years ago. "He's remembered," Ben said, and left it there.

Ben has had his own shop since 1999. His middle son works alongside him now, and four of the old Irion makers are within ten minutes of the farm, building on their own and sending each other work. It is a small hub of people who still do it all the old way.

A carved shell crest, cleaned and refinished. Nothing here is new except the care.

The bench notes

I asked Ben to walk me through how he matches a color, because that is the question I get most from people with an old piece or an old house. His answer is a method, and every step in it is chosen so that the next step can still be changed.

Dye first, on the bare wood. Ben preps to 220 and fogs thinned non-grain-raising dye directly onto the wood to set the background color. Dye, not stain: the dye molecule is small enough to go deep into the cellulose, and you can keep building it darker and more saturated. An oil stain sits on top and only moves the color so far. "Dyes are crucial for color matching. Oil stain as a tool is okay, but it only affects color so much."

Wet it with naphtha to see what you have. Acetone, alcohol, water and lacquer thinner will all lift a dye. Naphtha won't. So he wets the dyed surface with naphtha and gets, for a minute, an honest preview of what a coat of finish will do to that color — the depth, the refraction, the wet look — without committing to anything. Then more dye, and wet it again. Sneak up on it.

A spit coat, a scuff, then the glaze. Sometimes an oil stain he makes up himself from linseed oil and hand-ground pigment goes on next; more often a spit coat of shellac, cut back with a maroon pad or 400, and then a heavy-bodied glaze on top of the shellac to bring the color the rest of the way in. On the big architectural jobs the glaze is a reversible water-based one he calls his grunge glaze, and it is what turns a sample board into a room. "Once you get on the room, things always change. You have to improvise."

Kill the orange from the far side of the color wheel. This was the trick I had never heard. When a match is close but carries that amber-orange cast — and it nearly always does — Ben tints a very thin shellac, about a half-pound cut, with blue or green dye and fogs it over the work. Green pulls a red-orange toward a neutral brown. Blue pulls it cooler, toward umber. He uses violet too. You are never trying to land on blue or green; you are borrowing a little of the opposite to cancel the cast. "That's probably one of the important tricks in color matching. You can get it close, but it'll have that amber-orange to it, and you just need to get that to go away some."

Dewaxed as the working coat, because the glaze has to stick. Ben uses a lot of Super Blonde dewaxed, and the reason is not the durability dogma. It is predictability: he knows exactly how his glazes and topcoats behave over it. He uses wax-in Amber too and has noticed no durability difference either way. What he reaches for when the job is age is dewaxed Garnet, on light woods and dark. Old varnish yellows, and sometimes that yellowed look is the image a client carries of the piece; Garnet lets him recreate it with a material that comes off again.

Black shellac as a distressing tool. He sifts a little pigment and rottenstone into black shellac to bulk it up, pounces it into the places a century of hands and dust would have left it, and mutes it back with his palm. Or airbrushes it. It also, he notes, sets like concrete in the one plastic cup he mixes it in. He has stopped trying to clean that cup.

Chip infills with a shellac stick. If he can get a wood patch in, he does. For small chip-out on an antique, a traditional shellac burn-in stick is the accepted repair — it disappears under the topcoat in a way modern fillers do not. More colors on the shelf means less mixing at the bench.

A blanket chest on Ben's bench.

Reversibility is the whole point

Everything above shares a thread, and Ben named it before I could: "Shellac's beautiful because it's reversible."

On antiques he works the way a conservator works. An isolation layer first — shellac, or B-72 where the job wants a modern resin — so that whatever goes on top can be taken off again by him or by the next person, fifty years on. Fish glue or hide glue on every repair, never anything that can't be undone. He keeps a stock of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wood, bought as broken pieces and knocked apart, so that a patch is period wood and not a guess. He has written treatment proposals for a Chicago art museum, and spent more hours on the paperwork than on the piece.

When I took Don Williams's historic-finishing class this summer, the same ethos ran through every demonstration: protect the wood, isolate every layer, think about the person who has to undo your work. Hearing it again from a restorer in a farm shop, with no institution asking him for documentation, told me it isn't a museum rule. It is what the craft asks of you once you take it seriously.

Witness marks

In November Ben starts a job at a property in Chester County that dates to 1737 — an iron furnace where, he told me, cannon were cast for Washington's army, and where Washington stayed. He will spend three or four months restoring the original pine study. The study has been refinished. Somebody, at some point in the intervening two and a half centuries, brushed varnish over it, and the varnish has aged into something that is neither original nor honest.

Ben has already found what he is looking for. Pull a hinge, lift a door, turn over a glue block someone added later, and there it is: a patch nobody's brush ever reached. Restorers call these witness marks — the small places where the original surface survived because it was hidden, and which tell you what the whole room was meant to look like. "Restoration, conservation work — it's looking for those areas that somebody didn't get a brush to."

A witness mark is evidence, and it is also a kind of instruction. It says: this is what the maker intended, and everything laid over it since was somebody else's idea. Much of what Ben does is not adding anything. It is finding the witness marks and then carefully, reversibly, undoing the well-meant work of the years in between — the varnish somebody grabbed in 1920, the polyurethane somebody grabbed in 1975 — until the piece is telling its own story again.

Not every intervening layer is a mistake, and Ben was quick to say so. The grime that built up where an old coat was brushed over a dirty surface is the patina people prize, and it is not his job to erase a century. The judgment is in knowing which layers are the object's history and which are just somebody's error. That judgment doesn't come out of a book. It comes from Rebalsky's jars, from the makers down the road, from thirty years of turning things over and looking underneath.

The layers a restorer reads before touching anything.

What we are really doing

I want to say something here that goes past the bench, because it is the thing I actually came away with, and because I have been thinking about it a lot lately.

A piece of furniture that was made in 1780 has already outlived everyone who built it, everyone who first sat at it, and most of the people who have owned it since. If it is cared for, it will outlive Ben, and me, and whoever reads this. Restoring it properly — not stripping it to bare wood and making it new, but reading the witness marks and returning it to what its maker meant — is not decorating. It is a kind of stewardship. You are holding a thing in trust between people you never met and people who are not born yet.

That is an unusual position to put yourself in, and I think it is one of the more honorable ways a person can spend a working life. The craftsman who does this is making a wager that the work of human hands is worth keeping — that the person who cut those dovetails in 1780 mattered, that the family who will inherit the chest in 2080 matters, and that the way to honor both is to do the work so well, and so reversibly, that the next steward can do it again. Preserving the past well is an expression of the values we hope the future will preserve. It says that the people who came before us were real and their work had worth, that the people alive now deserve to live among true things, and that the people who follow are owed the same inheritance we received, not a poorer one.

There is a lot of talk about leaving the world better than you found it. Most of it is about large things. Ben's version is small and literal and, I think, more convincing: a room in a 1737 house that will look, when he leaves it, the way it was meant to look, finished in a material the next person can take off without harming what is underneath. He has left the world one honest room better. Do that for thirty years and you have lived a good life by any measure I understand.

We sell shellac. That is the whole business, and I don't want to dress it up. But the reason I find it worth doing is that shellac is the material this kind of stewardship runs on — the finish that can always be undone, that the old makers used and the conservators still reach for, and that lets a person like Ben do right by the past without foreclosing the future. Keeping the real thing available to the people who work this way is the job. Writing down what they know, from the people who actually do the work, is the other half of it, because Ben is right that the good books are few and most of what he knows came from older men willing to give up a secret. When the hands go, the knowledge goes with them unless somebody writes it down.

Ben's business is Benjamin Parry Studios, in Oxford, Pennsylvania. If you have an old piece or an old room in that part of the world and you want it done the way it was done, he is who I would call.

A raised-panel fireplace wall, finished by Ben. Built to be looked at for a long time.

From the bench

The materials from Ben's shop, if you want to try the methods:

• Dewaxed Super Blonde — the predictable working coat under a glaze
• Dewaxed Garnet — the look of a century of yellowed varnish, reversibly
• Merit Burn-In Sticks — traditional shellac sticks for chip infills; every color photographed on one page
• Black Shellac — between shipments; the notify-me on that page is the way to catch the next lot

New to the grade names? How to Read a Bag of Shellac walks through them.

Nothing hidden. Nothing added.