A landlord tripled the rent on a West Virginia workshop that has been open since 1961. Curtis Hedrick has until September 30th to clear 754 hand-carved dachshunds off the shelves — and he has cut them to $39.

Lewisburg, W.Va. — The letter came in March. One page. It was polite.

It said the building had changed hands, thanked him for his tenancy, and set out the new figure. Six hundred dollars a month became eighteen hundred. He had ninety days to accept or give notice.

“There’s nothing crooked about it,” he says. “They bought a building. They can charge what a building’s worth. It just isn’t worth that to me, because I’m not renting people a room for the weekend. I’m cutting up wood in there.”

Lewisburg has done well. That is the whole of it. The downtown is a registered historic district, there is a Carnegie Hall four blocks away, and for about fifteen years now people have been discovering the place on long weekends. Storefronts that used to hold a shoe repair and a feed supply hold candles and cashmere.

Curtis does not have a quarrel with any of it.

“Town looks better than it did in 1979, I’ll tell you that. I’m glad people come. I just can’t make anything that pays eighteen hundred a month in rent, and neither could my dad, and neither can anybody who works with their hands. That’s not a complaint. That’s arithmetic.”

What he does in there

It starts as a block of Appalachian basswood, which is the wood American carvers have used for as long as there have been American carvers. It is soft enough to take a blade cleanly and close-grained enough to hold an edge on a shape, and it has been the wood for painted work — decoys, signboards, folk carving — for two hundred years.

He rough-cuts the profile out of the block. Then the shape comes off it with a knife and a gouge, in that order, and always in the same order: the drop of the chest, the set of the ear, the line of the back. The head takes the longest, and the head is the part that decides whether the thing looks like a dog or like a doorstop.

Sixty-five years in the same room

He did not open the shop. His father did.

Everett Hedrick took the lease on the place in 1961, a block off Washington Street, and painted Hedrick & Son across the window. Curtis was six years old at the time. He took it over in 1984.

The lettering on the glass is the original. It has been touched up twice.

The dog under the bench

It has always been a general shop. Cutting boards. Stools. Porch rails. Whatever the county needed and nobody else would make in ones and twos — and Curtis still makes all of it.

Curtis took it over in the spring of 1984, and by that autumn a woman had come in wanting a wedding present and could not settle on anything. While she was deciding, she noticed the dog asleep under the bench.

Chester was a dachshund, and he was under that bench every working day for thirteen years. She asked whether Curtis could make something that looked like him. He said he would try. It took four attempts and most of a week to get the head right, and he has been cutting that same shape ever since.

Ask him how many he has made and he will tell you he has no idea. His son keeps the records, and the number the computer gives is 11,482.

Chester has been dead since 1997. There have been two dachshunds in this room since, and neither of them was ever carved. “People ask me if I got bored of it. Forty-two years of the same dog.” He thinks about it. “No. He was a good dog.”

Thursdays are for paint

Once the shape is off the block it gets sanded through three grades, until it stops catching on a thumb, and then it goes on the rack to wait its turn.

Only then does it get painted, by hand, one at a time, and sealed. He does the painting on Thursdays because Thursday is the day the shop is quiet, and he has done it on a Thursday since about 1990 for no reason he can give you.

What’s under the paint

Almost everything sold in this shape is cast polyresin. A mineral-filled resin is poured into a silicone mould, left to cure, pulled out, and painted. Nobody carves anything. The mould does the shape, and it does it identically two thousand times.

Resin is brittle wherever it is thin, and in this shape the thinnest points are always the ear and the back legs. So that is where it takes the knock. And when a cast piece chips, what shows through is not a lighter shade of the same thing. It is grey.

You cannot sand it out and you cannot touch it in, because there is nothing underneath the paint except filler.

A carved piece behaves the other way round. The paint is on it, but the thing underneath is wood, all the way through. Knock it against a tap and you get a dent rather than a break, because wood gives and resin snaps. And if you do take a chip out of the colour, what is under there is basswood — which you can touch in with a dab of paint, or leave alone and let it look like something that gets used.

The other thing is that they are not identical to each other, which is what people write to him about most. One ear sits a little higher. One back has a slightly deeper dip in it. “A woman told me once that hers looked different from the picture and she thought she’d been sent a second,” he says. “I told her they all look different from the picture. She said that was the best thing she’d heard all week.”

The card he keeps in the drawer

Ask him what he is proudest of and he does not talk about the wood.

“A fellow came in this February. His mother had died and they were clearing the house, and he’d found one of mine on the kitchen windowsill. He wanted to know where it came from, because nobody in the family had any idea.”

Curtis remembered her. She had come in on a wet Tuesday in 2015, bought it for herself, and asked him not to wrap it because she wanted to carry it out in her hand.

It has been in the drawer of the bench ever since. That goes in a box too.

It is not the business. It is the ten minutes before seven.

The business was going to end anyway. He is seventy-one and he has never pretended otherwise.

What he had not planned on losing is ten minutes of one particular morning, repeated for forty-two years. He gets there before seven. The heater is going, the coffee is on, the first block is already on the bench, and for about ten minutes nobody in West Virginia wants anything from him.

“That’s the part,” he says. “And nobody’s buying that off me. They just want the room.”

“People keep asking what I’ll set up next. Nothing. I’m not renting a shed out by the interstate at my age so I can carry on carving dogs. When the keys go back, that’s the end of it. There is no 11,483.”

Why the price is $39

There are 754 left. He knows because he counted them himself, twice, on a Sunday, with a pencil and the back of an invoice.

They exist because he carved them through the winter and spring for the autumn, the way he has every year since 1984. September through Christmas is the whole year for a shop like this. He built for a season he is not going to get.

So he set a number and stopped thinking about it. They were $99. They are $39. There is no clock behind that and nobody talked him into it.

And it should be said plainly: the money does not fix anything. All 754 of them at $39 does not come close to a year of the new rent. That was never what the decision was about.

“I’m not spending the last six weeks in this shop haggling,” he says. “I made these so somebody has something decent on a counter. I’d rather they were in kitchens in Ohio and Oregon than in a skip behind the building, or in my son’s garage for the next twenty years. They’re getting the room. They’re not getting these.”

From people who already have one

There is only one place they come from

His son Brent has handled the orders and the website since 2016. Curtis has never once looked at it.

“Brent does the computer end. I could not tell you the first thing about any of it. At the minute he’s mostly taping boxes shut and getting on at me to work faster.”

They have only ever been sold from this one room, which is less a decision than an oversight — nobody ever got round to putting them anywhere else. And when these 754 are gone there is no second run. Not because of demand, but because there will be no room left to carve them in.

What it comes down to

It is the one that will still be here in forty years.

The thing under the paint is wood, so a knock leaves a mark instead of a hole. There is no seam on it, because there was no mould. You can feel the blade in the surface. And the one that turns up at your door is not the one in the photograph, because there is no such thing as the one in the photograph.

For another few weeks it is also this: the difference between the last run of a sixty-five-year-old shop going out the front door, and going into a skip in October.

His guarantee, in his own words

Every one still goes out with 90 days, money back, no questions asked — deadline or no deadline.

“I only want these ending up with people who’ll actually use them,” he says. “If it isn’t right, put it back in the post and Brent will refund you and neither of us will think anything of it. I’d just like it sat on a counter somewhere doing its job.”