Many of the pieces Hilton has used like stencils or cookie cutters for various tables, fiddle stools, and chairs.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hilton is a chair maker. He runs a one-man show<\/a> out of his shop in Marengo, Iowa, a tiny town off a rural two-lane highway and a little over an hour west of Des Moines. And he\u2019s a bit old-fashioned. In Hilton\u2019s shop, the only piece of computerized machinery is his pocket calculator. Everything he does is by hand, using equipment manufactured before he was born. He slices thick boards of wood into curved armrests using a 1919 band saw, the blade protected by the inner tube of a 20-inch bicycle wheel. He sands the boards down on a 1930s stoke sander. Saws boards in half with a powerful 1950s circular saw that has no safety guard. And the wood: It\u2019s all locally harvested \u2014 often thanks to a few generously windy storms. He has so much of it that his shed out back is literally sinking into the ground. \u201cIf I never went out and cut down another tree,\u201d Hilton says, \u201cI could probably still keep going for 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The market might not let him. Today, the American furniture industry isn\u2019t exactly in America. It\u2019s been globalized, shipped off to Asia, where the wooden parts of a rocking chair may have been nailed together on an assembly line and then shipped back across the Pacific to be sold at your local Walmart. All for 30 percent less than it would have cost had it been manufactured here in the U.S. A report by Mann, Armistead, & Epperson, an international leader in furniture industry analysis, found that about three quarters of the current wooden furniture found on store shelves and in freshly furnished homes has been imported from overseas \u2014 the highest it\u2019s ever been. Since 2000, employment in furniture manufacturing has fallen from roughly 680,000 to roughly 385,000. Furniture manufacturing plants in America have been closing left<\/a> and right<\/a>. And even the smaller, family-owned plants \u2014 like Hilton\u2019s Amish neighbors several miles over in the Amana Colonies \u2014 are struggling to compete<\/a> with Asia\u2019s cheap, Walmart-friendly prices.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt used to be that, if you would drive through the Amanas, it was stop-and-go traffic,\u201d Hilton says. \u201cYou know, it would take you 10 minutes to go five blocks, just because it was so full of people. And now, it\u2019s dead. You can whizz through town at 70 miles an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which means that, to stay afloat, Hilton has had to take his chairs elsewhere: to festivals, the Iowa State Fair, and to woodworking competitions. That\u2019s how he\u2019s secured customers in every state but Hawaii. Passing through, they stop by Hilton\u2019s booth and occasionally fall asleep in his rocking chairs by accident \u2014 \u201ca good advertisement,\u201d Hilton says.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

He needs all the advertising he can get. He bought his shop in 2007 \u2014 the same year the Great Recession sent the housing market, and therefore the wood and furniture markets, into turmoil. He survived the downturn in the mass-market game by focusing on customization. \u201cThe thing I like to tell people is they\u2019ll get what they want,\u201d Hilton says, \u201crather than just going to a store and picking out what\u2019s there.\u201d He specializes in rocking chairs and a peculiar three-legged, bent-back chair, named for the smooth way in which the backrest curves into the armrests like a contorted horseshoe. He cuts all of these pieces with laser precision on his band saw and cuts them to accommodate any size. He can mix woods. He can engrave names on headrests \u2014 one time a customer requested \u201cOld Fart.\u201d \u201cAnd I said, \u2018Are you sure?\u2019\u201d Hilton says. \u201cAnd he says, \u2018Yep. Nobody else is going to sit in it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n