The Shop

State of the art meets history

Wow, look at where I get to work. It’s pretty cool to say the least. It’s old and full of cool history. When you visit we’ll give you the two-bit tour.

The building dates to 1937 as the Browns Summit Broom Works owned and operated by the Bevills and Doggetts. It stopped being a full time broom enterprise in 1988 when Mr. Bevill retired. It saw more than 50 years worth of industry making millions of brooms. There were several times during their history that they made 400 plus dozen brooms a week. This was done with a five to six person crew working typically four 10 hour days a week, and it required a lot of hands on labour.

In 2005 Mrs. Bevill was kind enough to allow me to rent it from her for my enterprise of furniture making. She is a true jewel of a person, delightful, charming and very interesting. So with some work reworking the insides, it became over the course of four months a woodworking shop.

In January of 2006 Rick Haferbacker came to me looking for work. I couldn’t provide, but tongue and cheek suggested he could take a crack at starting up broom making. He did. He taught himself with the help of one lesson on one day and from there became Browns Summits second Broom Maker. It’s a fine stout broom like they used to be. So today we co-exist making a few dozen brooms a week, fine furniture and other fine woodworking.