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John B. Vaughan III and J. Brackett Vaughan IV
Owners John B. Vaughan III and J. Brackett Vaughan IV are pictured above in their Warsaw, Virginia workshop. Their showroom is located in Tappahannock.
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Brackett Vaughan
Brackett Vaughan is pictured creating a cabinet panel by gluing and clamping boards. The gluing table is also used to make tabletops.
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The exposed Rosehead and Cut Masonry nails give Hoskins Creek’s tables an authentic farmhouse look and feel.
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“I’d always worked on cars and boats, so this table making came naturally.” J. Brackett Vaughan IV
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“This is probably the most successful thing I’ve done in terms of bringing home groceries.” John B. Vaughan III
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The Hoskins Creek New England Windsor chair
The Hoskins Creek’s New England Windsor chair comes in four different styles. Bar stools are available, too. The Vaughans use new mill Southern Yellow Pine and reclaimed wood for their furniture line. The reclaimed wood is sourced locally in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula.
Thirty years ago, rustic farm tables weren’t in style. The thing was: every time John B. Vaughan III made one, somebody would buy it, so he’d have to make another.
“This is probably the most successful thing I’ve done in terms of bringing home groceries,” Vaughan says with his typical self-deprecating chuckle as he props one foot on a chair in the second-floor office of Hoskins Creek Table Company.
It’s not as if he set out to create a furniture company. His was a circuitous path that began with working for Dupont, a job he refers to as the best and worst he ever had. “If I’d stayed there, I could have retired at fifty, but I hated working in a factory. What I did, they could have taught a chimp to do.”
For a while, he was an ABC enforcement officer, first in Newport News and then in Tappahannock. “I was chasing stills,” he says, referring to illegal bootlegging. “There were two of us working eight counties out of Tappahannock.”
When the local sheriff got sick, he was asked to take the job despite being a mere twenty-eight years old, making him the youngest sheriff in the state. When the general election came up, he says he lost to a local boy and sold cars for a while.
In 1975 times were prosperous and crop prices were up, so he bought a farm in Essex. But farming on a small scale was on its way out while bigger farms were getting bigger. “Most of the ones who survived were family-owned farms who didn’t have to pay rent. When they got low on money, they cut timber to make ends meet.”
In 1988 the farm was sold on the courthouse steps to the highest bidder to help repay Vaughan’s debt to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
And he was ready for his next act.
About that time, he and his wife opened a craft and antique consignment shop while Vaughan sold real estate, on the side, for Bowers, Nelms, and Fonville in Mechanicsville. The only problem was that people would bring stuff to the shop and he’d wind up fixing it, a chore that kept him busy working on furniture, something for which he had a real knack.
“From the day we opened that store, it always operated in the black,” he says with pride. Theirs was the first business to bring helium balloons to Tappahannock. Within a few years, there were four craft stores; the writing was on the wall.
It was around that time, 1989 or so, that Vaughan built his first table, not for anyone other than himself. He took a fallen cedar tree to be milled at a box factory in Dunnsville, where, back in the days before wax-lined cardboard boxes became the norm, wooden boxes were made out of rough-sawn wood to be lined with ice for shipping fresh fish..
“That cedar of mine lay there for a year before he sawed it,” Vaughan recalls of the rustic farm table he crafted, as a farmer would have done, with nails showing and few finishing flourishes. Somewhere along the line, the table changed hands. “I’d like to have that table I made back now. I wonder where it is,” he muses.
On the family’s annual trips to the beach, he’d set a table upside down in the truck bed and pack the family’s belongings around and on top of it. “A lot of times, I’d sell the table before we got back home, so I’d have to make another.”
Table making had gradually become a business, so when son Brackett—a family name adopted from the doctor who delivered the first John Brackett Vaughan—finished college in Florida and couldn’t decide what to do, his father suggested he come work for him temporarily until he figured out what he wanted.
“Then I met the right woman and that was it,” says Brackett. “I’d always worked on cars and boats, so this table making came naturally.”
After a period of buying at auction old furniture that needed to be fixed and making crude tables that appeared to be 100 years old, the Vaughans moved on to fashioning tables from new wood made to look weathered. “We’d beat them with chains, cut them with knives, and knock chips out of the legs to distress them,” Vaughan says.
Finding places to sell their wares involved carting a sample table around in Vaughan’s old Dodge truck. After taking one to Greenfront Furniture in Farmville, he recalls, “I didn’t hear back for a year, so I called them. By then, they’d seen that Unfinished Furniture in Richmond was selling them. That’s when things took off.”
Shockoe Valley Wood Stove in Richmond, American Harvest in Williamsburg, and Classic Touches in Amelia joined Mosaic in Callao and stores in Pennsylvania and Maryland in carrying Hoskins Creek tables and chairs.
They only began selling chairs because one of their dealers, Dine ‘n Recline, wanted to be able to sell full sets. Currently, chair parts for four styles of chair are purchased from Slovenia and shipped to Hoskins Creek for assembly and finishing here.
Sometimes, customers would insist on buying tables and chairs in the dealer’s parking lot, as they were being unloaded. Business continued to boom to the point where they were sending out a 38' trailer loaded to the top with their merchandise every single month. From 1994 through 2002, the company saw growth every year before it finally leveled off.
“Then the bubble broke,” Brackett says ruefully.
Fortunately, having just come off a really strong financial period, the Vaughans had begun an expansion, having started construction on their new facility in Warsaw back in 2003.
“It took three years to build because we built as we could afford it,” Brackett says. “When we finished, it was paid for.” And while the recession might have been insurmountable for a less experienced business, the Vaughans discovered that the upside of having less demand for their stock inventory was that they now had far more time to devote to custom work.
It’s an area where they excel. Old Bust Hill Brewery in Vint Hill commissioned them to make all the tables for the brewery’s tasting room. Pedestal tables of new wood were crafted for Cochon on 2nd, a French restaurant in Williamsburg. In Richmond, a 14' community table for Ellwood Thompson Natural Market was made out of re-claimed wood, part of a trend toward repurposed materials.
“We’re getting back full circle,” Brackett says of their three decades in the business. “We began using old wood, then new wood, and in the last three years, it’s been lots of reclaimed wood. Not that we were looking to evolve, but there’s been demand for more rustic tables and it’s hard to get new wood to look that distressed.”
As with any trend, popularity—for example, DIY home improvement shows on TV—drives prices up, so the Vaughans began doing their own salvage work, taking down their first building, a barn outside Warsaw, five years ago. Doing so two or three times a year allows them to have direct control of what they get and has netted them a good stockpile of reclaimed lumber for future projects.
For the new Northern Neck Burger in Tappahannock, owner Jay Wolfson set out to be conscientious of the environment by leaving as small a footprint as possible, a goal accomplished by using repurposed wood from the building itself. Hoskins Creek created the tables, the countertop for the bar, and the condiment station for the bustling new restaurant.
Wolfson’s intent, besides offering a killer burger, was to give guests a sense of pride that the tables they were dining on were made from the original building. “I’d seen the quality of work at their show room and it had the ‘wow’ factor,” Wolfson says. “The fact that they specialize in using repurposed wood made me think they’d be a perfect fit for what we were looking to create with our decor. Plus they have an incredible reputation for building custom furniture.”
Just as important to Wolfson was using a local business. “We’re part of a tight community and in order for all of the small businesses to thrive, we need to support each other. I’m his customer today and he’s mine tomorrow. That’s how it works here.”
That mutual reliance was also evident when local design firm Pillar and Peacock worked on renovating the historic property Mount Airy for the DIY channel program American Rehab. With the TV cameras filming and completion coming down to the wire, they still needed outdoor tables, so designers Adrianne Bugg and Brandeis Short knew who could deliver quick turnaround on the distinctive wood tables they envisioned for the yard: Hoskins Creek.
Having their handiwork displayed on national television is a far cry from the Vaughans’ days of making one table at a time in the garage. These days, their sprawling facility in Warsaw hums with the activity of two employees intent on their work.
Walking into the building, a visitor is greeted by the buzzing of saws, piles of lumber, an American flag, and a whole lot of furniture. A sign on the wall reads, “Dust is a country accent.”
Naturally, there are plenty of tables and chairs, but a closer look reveals benches made from siding boards, an elegant linen closet, a slender chimney cupboard, nightstands, and a generous gathering table. If it can be made of wood, Hoskins Creek Table Company probably has or, if not, will do so on a custom basis.
On the front porch, awaiting its turn, sits a very used-looking table built twenty-five years ago, which the original customers brought in for refurbishing so it can be presented to their son as a wedding present.
“That’s what these tables were built for: to use and tear up,” Brackett says with pride. “When kids get done scratching them and doing glitter projects on them—I can’t tell you how many tables have glitter embedded in them—that’s when we refurnish them, once the kids are gone.”
Vaughan points out that the original tables had square legs, but he began tapering them for a slightly more sophisticated look, or at least as sophisticated as a rustic farm table can be. “Dad’s an artist,” his son says, acknowledging that while farm tables have evolved very little over a quarter of a century, the process has, as time and experience have taught them better ways to fashion them.
Today some tables are made completely of reclaimed wood, but 90 percent use reclaimed wood for the table top and distressed new wood for the skirt and legs because new wood is more durable.
It’s still very much a hands-on family business, with the senior Vaughan handling the paper work and taxes and the younger running the day-to-day business. They’re open for retail sales on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., but don’t expect to find Hoskins Creek Table Company on Facebook, because they don’t want to compete with their wholesalers and dealers.
“There’s something to be said for being small. Our website is twelve years old and it’s awful,” Brackett says with a laugh. “Maintaining a website can be a full-time job. When I come in, I want to work. I love our product and I still love coming to work every day.”
Vaughan may have long since passed retirement age at Dupont, but he’s not showing any signs of slowing down. Pointing to an old farm table in the hallway that once belonged to his mother, he chuckles.
“My mother grew up on a farm with purpose-driven furniture, so when she got married, she wanted fancy mahogany Queen Anne furniture. She was surprised that we made a living at this.”
Chances are, she was the only one.