Charles McRaven has been building things in old-fashioned ways for most of his life. His father, an engineer, built the family house in Arkansas where he was raised. McRaven started working on his first house—a log cabin restoration—in 1946, at age 11. Now 72, he hasn’t slowed down much. McRaven, who lives just beyond Free Union, in Albemarle County, is a master stone mason and master log cabin joiner. He’s also an expert timber framer and blacksmith—not in the master craftsmen category for the latter two fields, he says, “but I’m a pretty good journeyman.”
That’s surely an understatement. He makes, out of iron and steel, many of the tools he uses when building or restoring timber frame or log cabin homes—chisels for mortising, broadaxes for squaring timbers, sometimes a timber-finishing tool called an adze—along with knives, andirons, kitchen pot racks and, one of his specialties, custom-designed hinges and latches for handcrafted wooden doors. As McRaven has said, blacksmithing and his building skills nowadays are more art form than necessity. Think of him as a 21st-century homesteader.
McRaven had a restoration business until 2006. He worked on plantation houses, gristmills, covered bridges—but, owing mostly to a serious leg injury three years ago, he’s given that up. “I was looking the other way and a big beam came down off a pile of timbers and crushed my leg. It slipped up on me from behind.” But, as you would expect, the builder is stoic. “I’ve always maintained that, if you do this kind of work, you’re going to get a scratch now and then.” Asked if pioneer building is hard work, he responds, “Every bit of it.”
McRaven now spends most of this time teaching and consulting, traveling around the country to advise on new and historic structures. He’s also involved in a lot of craft exhibits and workshops, many held at his home. In June 2007, he and a group of volunteers raised a log cabin for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. Tyhfall, he and some volunteers built a small timber frame for the Foundation for the Humanities and exhibited it at the National Folk Festival in Richmond. “It’s all mortised together and pegged—no hardware in it at all. It’s a good way to build.”
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