Southern Living Magazine, December 1984

SOUTHERNERS ™

Their Success Is Old- Fashioned considering that their showroom is filled with highboys and secretaries, bed, cupboards, tables and chairs, it may

Considering that their showroom is filled with highboys and secretaries, beds, cupboards, tables and chairs, it may seem odd that the first thing the McSwain family of Charlotte stresses about their work is its intangible nature. Until you study the furniture they make. And until you get to know the family.

The art is intangible. So are close family ties, insistence on quality workmanship, and a sense of the heritage that lives in traditional furniture design. Quality work and the family seem inseparable. "From the very beginning, we decided if we could not build quality, we were not going to stay in the business," says Frances MSwain, who runs the business and sees customers. Her husband, Eulan and son, Mike, work in the shop.  

Their success can be measured easily by the demand for their work. The State of North Carolina commissioned the McSwains to restore furnishings stolen from one of its historic sites and left out in the rain. Other customers are not only in Charlotte, but scattered across the country. They lean of the McSwains by word of mouth: the family does little advertising and keeps the business small.

"Most of our customers say they'd prefer to have one good piece of furniture rather than fill up a house with a lot of junk," says Eulan. And they wait. Says mike, "I can't remember the time we weren't six months behind. And I can remember a lot of times when we were a year and a half behind filling orders.

Whether custom building a silver chest, reproducing a grandfather clock from a photograph, restoring a rocker, or copying a dining room chair to fill out a set, making furniture the old way takes time. Most of the McSwain's work is 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century designs - Hepplewhite, Sheraton, or Chippendale. That's what their customers most commonly request.

The McSwains prefer to work by hand to match the quality of the past. They naturally make some concessions to technology and the passage ot time. Tools that have existed for years are motor driven now, rather than water driven.

But all the steps originally done by hand -the carving, the dovetailing, the fitting, the assembly, the inlays - still are. "I guess it would be more exotic if we were on a little stream somewhere and had a big wheel. But then we'd be 150 miles away from Charlotte and would have only two customers," muses Mike.

The elder McSwains came to Charlotte in the early 1950's, seeking greater opportunities than existed in rural North Carolina. Eulan had grown up on a cotton farm in Cleveland County and before serving in World War II, worked in a textile mill. In 1945, rather than return to his old job, he used the G.I. Bill to apprentice himself to a furnituremaker. He took the position chiefly because he had friends in the shop. But the work came naturally. "I don't think I could ever understand why anybody couldn't just pick u a mallet and chisel and some inlay and do it," he recalls.

After moving to Charlotte, Eulan worked for another furnituremaker until he opened his own business in 1963. Mike, who had grown up making furniture but who had taken a job with an oil company, returned to the family business 12 years ago. "We were highly complimented when he decided to come back," says Frances. And Mike's 15-year old son is beginning to show an interest as well.

The McSwains themselves are a bit surprised at the success of their old-fashioned techniques in this era of mass production. But their workmanship - from English calfskin hand-tooled and dyed for desk tops to solid stock woods joined with either dovetails or mortise and tenon joints - obviously has a lasting appeal. The McSwains build their furniture not only the old way but to last as long as the antiques that inspired them.

"There is no reason why we can't build just as well as they did," says Eulan of the generations of furnituremakers who preceded him. "I think this idea that we can't do it just because somebody did it 200-250 years ago is a bunch of goop. Because somebody can come along and figure it out." Eulan and Mike McSwain have. And very well, too.

December 1984