Renowned furniture maker Thomas Moser died March 5 at his house on Dingley Island. His Shaker-inspired wooden chairs have supported presidents and popes. And although his widow, Mary, says they were not deeply ingrained in the Harpswell community, this place was Moser’s home for 35 years.
Tom and Mary first came to Maine around 1960 for a vacation, on a friend’s advice and with a borrowed tent. Aiming for Bar Harbor, they ended up lost in thick fog on a back road, somewhere near Boothbay.
When they realized they weren’t going to make it to their destination, Tom pulled the car over and felt around on hands and knees for a flat spot to pitch their tent. Early the next morning, they heard a voice outside the tent. A man was asking them to move their tent from his driveway so he could get his truck out.
But he invited them to go inside and see his wife for breakfast. The Mosers spent the next several days with the couple. Even though they searched for it later, they were never able to find their way back to that house.
They did find their way back to Maine. A few years after that trip, Tom was teaching English at a university in Saudi Arabia so the Mosers could see a bit more of the world.
Mary says they learned there how vital it is to have a place to call home, even when you’re far from it. They had sold their house when they moved to the Middle East. Mary’s mother had left their childhood home, and Tom’s parents had both died when he was a teenager. Maine was the place they thought of when they were homesick, so Maine was where they went home to.
They had already developed a knack for finding, refinishing and selling old pieces of furniture. Mary would strip off the old paint, Tom would repair it, and they’d turn it around for a profit. In New Gloucester, the two began renovating and reselling old houses, dividing the labor much the same way.
This was when Tom decided to leave his job as a college professor, and Thos. Moser was born. Moser was doubtless an excellent furniture designer and woodworker — although as the business grew he left the latter to more skilled craftsmen — but the Mosers’ success also came from their ability to appeal to a back-to-the-land fantasy of apartment-bound New Yorkers. The anachronistic “Thos.” and marketing copy cribbed from old newspaper ads helped them play the part.
“They thought we were living the dream,” says Mary, who spent her days on every part of the business that wasn’t making furniture — accounting, marketing, sales, sweeping — and her evenings raising their four boys. The kids worked too. When other kids were playing football, Mary says, their sons were in the woodshop.
Tom and Mary moved to Harpswell in 1988. Their kids were grown up, their business had moved to a larger space in Auburn, and they wanted to be on the water. They bought about a dozen acres on the southwest corner of Dingley Island, first building a workshop — where Tom would design the company’s Harpswell chair — and then the house they would live in for the rest of their lives.
The Mosers built the house together, by hand, with help from other craftsmen. It is overflowing with wood and art.
Moser furniture adorns every room. Prototypes of a rejected line of upholstered furniture sit in the living room. In the guest room, an early example of Moser’s iconic Continuous Arm Chair is worn and coming loose in places. Running her hand over the back, Mary says she can feel from the wood’s thickness that it’s an early version of the design. Whatever she is feeling is imperceptible to a newcomer.
One piece in the family room stands out. It’s a simple side table, without the grace of other Moser pieces. Most notable are the visible brass screws — Moser avoided metal fasteners in his furniture and his house wherever possible. This table is one of a series Tom and Mary built together for each of their grandkids, based on the only piece of furniture they know of that his father ever made.
Behind it, glass doors open onto a small lawn and a view of Sheep Island to the south. Mary says it was important to have something more than open ocean out their windows. They followed the tides, the birds, and the lobstermen and clam diggers. Their bed sits in a 180-degree bay of windows from which they could watch their world.
Mary notes the changes she’s observed: fewer eiders, fewer seals, fewer boats. More Canada geese. They share the Dingley Island pond with a beaver, who is constantly trying to dam up the pipe that drains water to the ocean. With their deep connection to wood, it’s no surprise to hear Mary and her son David jokingly gripe about the beaver’s indiscriminate gnawing — they wish he’d limit himself to the less desirable species.
Tom returned to Dingley Island shortly before he died. He opened his eyes and smiled as he came out of an ambulance and into the sunlight. When he was carried through the garage into his home, he looked up at the paneled ceiling and said, “I put that wood up there.” They were his last words.
