In May of 1982, I traveled to Sherburne, New York, to interview a man who made Adirondack pack baskets. That description, while accurate, hardly did justice to Dudley Frasure. By then Dudley had spent decades perfecting a craft that had begun not as a business or an artistic pursuit, but out of necessity. He had lived alone in a cabin on Hunt’s Mountain, cooked his meals over a wood stove, endured an extraordinary May snowstorm, learned the ways of the woods, and figured out how to turn a white ash tree into the splints from which he wove his baskets.
I was there with my tape recorder for RFD, the daily radio feature I produced for stations around the Northeast, and I soon discovered that Dudley had quite a story to tell.
The Doctor Said Arizona
Dudley’s unusual journey began in 1945. He suffered from severe asthma and allergies to farm animals, and a doctor advised him to get away from the family farm—specifically, to move to Arizona. That was out of the question. Dudley didn’t have the money, and his parents occasionally needed his help, so he needed to remain near Sherburne. His solution was considerably closer: he went up Hunt’s Mountain. There, on a friend’s land a few miles from home, Dudley built himself a cabin and lived for the next five years.
It was hardly a romantic retreat into the wilderness. He had to provide for himself, carry supplies up and down the mountain and contend with whatever nature decided to send his way. But in the process he developed the independence and ingenuity that would characterize much of the rest of his life. The Dudley I met nearly four decades later still seemed very much connected to those years.
Living on Hunt’s Mountain also presented a practical problem: Dudley needed a way to carry provisions. An Adirondack pack basket would have been ideal, but one cost about ten dollars—and Dudley didn’t have ten dollars.
So he made one.
That first basket was crude, by his own reckoning, but it set him on a course that would occupy much of his life. With help from an old-time basket maker, he learned the craft and gradually developed his own methods. The process began not with prepared material purchased from a supplier, but with a white ash tree. The log had to be worked until its growth rings separated into long splints suitable for weaving, traditionally an enormous amount of pounding and hand labor. Dudley knew the old method because he had done it that way on Hunt’s Mountain. Eventually, though, he began asking a characteristically Dudley question: Wasn’t there an easier way?
Keeping an Old Craft Alive
Dudley was no enemy of machinery. What concerned him was preserving the finished product. After leaving Hunt’s Mountain, he realized that if he were going to make baskets for a living, he couldn’t continue doing every laborious step exactly as it had always been done. He began inventing equipment that removed some of the drudgery while preserving the essential character of the handcraft. When I interviewed him, his shop and cellar contained saws and homemade machinery, including a device designed to duplicate the pounding necessary to separate the ash.
He had even consulted engineers looking for a solution before devising one himself. Work that might otherwise consume months could be accomplished in a fraction of the time, but Dudley insisted that the result had to be the same kind of splint a basket maker obtained by working entirely by hand. As he explained to me, “There’s no book can teach it, no pictures that can teach it. It has to come from one human being to another.”
For years, however, Dudley wasn’t particularly eager for that knowledge to pass from this human being to another. He guarded his methods, fearing that someone might copy what he had developed, turn it into a commercial operation and perhaps put him out of business. People had even approached him about buying the business.
There was an amusing irony. People traveled considerable distances to see Dudley and learn about his work, while some of those living closest to him had never watched the entire operation. His neighbors knew he made baskets, he told me, but essentially their reaction was: so what?
A few weeks after our interview, Dudley wrote to thank me for the RFD program. In that June 8, 1982 letter, he acknowledged that he once doubted he could pass along the “secrets” of his ancient craft, but told me he was then teaching two serious basket-making students. It was a revealing change for a man who had guarded his methods so carefully.
By 1982, however, Dudley was noticing a change. Younger people in particular were interested in seeing something made in front of them rather than watching the product of an increasingly computerized and mechanized world. Dudley wasn’t simply preserving an old craft by freezing it in time. He had found a way to adapt it so that it could survive.
His years on Hunt’s Mountain were never far from the story. In 1977, The Courier of Brookfield published Dudley’s reminiscences of an extraordinary May snowstorm he had experienced there in 1945. They offer a wonderful glimpse of his everyday life. As the storm gathered outside, Dudley sat down to home-cured ham, boiled potatoes, cole slaw made from cabbage he had stored beneath dry leaves, homemade whole-wheat bread and mincemeat pie.
The snow eventually reached about ten inches, bending trees beneath its weight. Dudley later regretted that no one had been there to photograph him trudging through it for water, homemade puttees wrapped around his legs. He imagined showing such a picture to a younger generation and saying, “There is the old hermit of Hunt’s Mountain, crawling out after a long winter of hibernation.”
From Hunt’s Mountain to a Wider Audience
By the late 1970s, Dudley and his baskets were attracting attention well beyond Sherburne. Between 1978 and 1980, filmmaker Richard Axt documented his craft in a 75-minute film, The Frasure Adirondack Packbasket. It followed the process from making splints from a white ash log through weaving and selling the finished basket, while also documenting the machinery Dudley had invented to reduce the labor without changing the essential quality of the handcraft.
When I interviewed Dudley in 1982, however, the film had not yet become generally available. On RFD I attributed the delay to bureaucratic red tape. We have since found evidence that the completed film was shown in various communities, but I have not yet located a surviving copy. An inquiry is now with Fenimore Art Museum, successor to the New York State Historical Association, to see whether one may survive in its collections.
Recognition of Dudley’s craftsmanship continued. By August 1985, the Syracuse Herald-Journal was describing a man who had made thousands of baskets and become a hero among craftspeople. The fellow who had gone into the woods because a doctor told him to leave the farm had become known far beyond the hills around Sherburne.
Dudley died in June 1992. Only weeks later, the Herald-Journal returned to his story with a feature carrying an appropriate headline: “Frasure Pack Basket is bound to endure.”
And endure it has. Dudley Frasure pack baskets still occasionally turn up today. I recently found one offered by an auction house, still identified by the name of the man who made it. Something that began because a young man living on Hunt’s Mountain couldn’t afford ten dollars for a pack basket had become an object worth preserving.
One Human Being to Another
Looking back on my 1982 visit, I don’t think the most interesting thing about Dudley Frasure was that he rejected modern life. He didn’t. After all, this supposed backwoodsman invented machinery. Nor was he trying simply to recreate the past. Dudley took something old, understood why it worked, and then figured out how to keep doing it in a changing world without destroying what made it worth doing in the first place.
There is a temptation to describe him as a modern-day Thoreau. The comparison is understandable: the cabin in the woods, self-sufficiency, closeness to nature and a certain independence from what the rest of the world considered necessary. But Dudley wasn’t living somebody else’s philosophy. He was solving his own problems.
The doctor said Arizona. Dudley chose Hunt’s Mountain. He needed a ten-dollar basket, so he made one. When making baskets entirely by hand became too laborious, he invented machinery to help. And when people eventually wanted to know how he did it, the man who once guarded his methods came to recognize something essential about the survival of an old craft.
“There’s no book can teach it, no pictures that can teach it. It has to come from one human being to another.”
More than forty years ago, I turned on a tape recorder in Sherburne and listened while Dudley Frasure told me his story.