Gardner is a small city in central Massachusetts. Founded in the 18th century in an area with abundant timber and water power, it rose to prominence in furniture manufacturing. Heywood Wakefield, Nichols & Stone, Conant Ball, and Temple Stuart are just a few of the dozens of furniture companies whose home was Gardner. The city was best known for the manufacture of chairs, at its peak producing over 4 million each year and filling schools, libraries, and restaurants all over the US. Gardner became known as the Chair City, and in 1905 celebrated this title by building the largest chair in the world.
For 25 years Tracie’s father worked for Nichols & Stone, the company that went the longest way putting the Chair in Chair City. Tracie recalls her father taking her and her sister to the factory as children. She sums up the importance of these visits when she explains, ‘The smell of sawdust is significant for me.’ During summers while she was in college, Tracie returned to Gardner and worked at Nichols & Stone as a floater. ‘At the time I was jealous of friends who had neat internships in cool cities, but it turned out that working in the factory actually influenced my artistic practices and interests as much as art school did.’
Nichols & Stone was the last of Gardner’s big furniture factories; it closed in 2008. Tracie had first-hand knowledge of how such a closing affected its many employees. ‘… it was really clear to me my community must be struggling in many ways with the loss of Nichols & Stone. I didn’t want people’s stories to go untold and I wanted to understand how a factory with such a great reputation and quality product with many employees who actually loved working there could close, and how an entire industry that built a city could just seemingly disappear.’
In 2009 Tracie started talking with the former employees of Nichols & Stone. ‘My first interview for this project was with my dad, Mike Pouliot.’ At the time she was living in North Carolina and holding down a full-time job. She traveled back and forth to Gardner to interview.
‘Eventually I was able to save money, quit my job, and focus on my art.’ Tracie began to listen to the interviews she had recorded and wondered how to share them. She began to see her own medium of printmaking in the context of telling the stories of the workers in Gardner’s furniture industry.
Tracie says an early interview with a former Nichols & Stone employee showed her what this project would become. ‘She worked there straight out of high school and was just a few years shy of retiring when they closed. So you can imagine all the life events she shared with her coworkers over the years. She had best friends, mentors, people who helped her grow up in the factory. They would decorate their work stations, bring in food to share, celebrate weddings, babies, and holidays together. She also loved the work, and was good at it. Her story so clearly explained the loss that happened when an entire industry moves. It was financial, but is was also about her identity, her social circle, her creativity, and her pride. These are all the things that make us feel like ourselves, and all of a sudden those things were swept out from under her.’
Tracie goes on to explain, ‘…the audio alone from the interviews with furniture workers is really compelling—there is definitely something special about hearing someone’s voice when they are talking from the heart… [but] this is a city of people who make things, and inspect the craftsmanship of things, and touch things to find out more about them. Whatever I did with these interviews had to be well-made and had to be an object people could interact with. So books seemed natural since I was dealing with words.’
Then, as Tracie explains, the real work began. She did a fundraiser to raise money for a traditional letterpress and industrial paper cutter, found space downtown, and wrote grants to get money to pay for bookmaking materials.
