Hudsonhubtimes.com - Kaleidoscope: Carvings are sights to behold

by Ken Lahmers, Aurora Advocate editor

When I was growing up, my folks and I visited a unique museum almost every year. Many times we'd see an old fellow with puffy white hair toiling in his nearby workshop.

Many other adults and youngsters of that 1950s-60s era who lived in Tuscarawas County did likewise, never tiring of seeing the old man's intricate carvings of trains again and again.

Many Northeast Ohoians might recognize that man's name -- Ernest "Mooney" Warther -- who a group of highly skilled Japanese carvers dubbed "the world's master carver" in the 1920s.

His nickname comes from the Swiss word "moonay," which means "bull of the herd." Other than his family, few people knew his first name was Ernest.

The white-haired old man died in 1973 at age 87, just a couple of years after I graduated from high school. He's by far one of Tuscarawas County's most revered native sons.

For the first time in nearly 40 years -- on July 19 -- I toured the Warther Museum during a road trip to see many of the places I was familiar with in my younger days.

Although a new museum building has been erected, the property is much the same as I remember it. Mooney's home and his wife's button house, featuring a display of thousands of buttons, remain.

There's a nicely landscaped hill planted with flowers sloping down from the buildings, with a boardwalk zig-zagging from the parking lot to the buildings.

In the back are a full-sized Baltimore & Ohio red caboose and a steam locomotive replica. Adjacent is the old B&O line, now a 50-mile short line operated by the R.J. Corman Railroad Group.

Trains weren't the only thing Mooney carved; he made kitchen knives, a tradition his heirs carry on today.

He also carved canes for presidents and dignitaries, a working replica of the steel mill where he once worked and a tree of 511 interconnected working wooden pliers.

One of the neatest things Mooney did when youngsters visited his museum was carve small pliers out of a single block of wood. He was a big hit with youngsters.

Born in 1885, Warther went to school only through the second grade, but when it comes to carving, he is considered an artistic and mechanical genius. His carvings have been appraised by the Smithsonian Institution as "priceless works of art."

He could have sold them for perhaps millions of dollars, but Mooney was a man of simple means. He and his wife, Freida, are buried in an unmarked grave in Maple Grove Cemetery, just up the street from where he lived most of his life.

His heirs have continued to operate the museum.

Items in the collection

Although Mooney began carving steam trains before then, it was 1928 when he built a workshop. Later, he reminisced that's when he "stopped whittling and started carving."

Mooney was fascinated by steam trains and carved 64 projects from 1914 to the early 1970s. His last work -- the Lady Baltimore steam engine -- remains unfinished, but on display, after Mooney suffered a stroke.

He first used bone and walnut, then ivory and ebony. The ivory came from old billiard balls, eyetooths of hippopotamus and elephant tusks, which could be obtained legally then.

After carving trains for nine years, he went on a national tour backed by the New York Central Railroad, and after that his carvings were displayed at New York's Grand Central Station for 2 1/2 years.

When the display ended in 1926, the railroad offered him $50,000 for the collection. He turned it down and returned to Dover, and later turned down an even more lucrative offer from Henry Ford.

In 1920, Mooney carved the Big Four's 4-4-2 Atlantic locomotive which had topped 100 miles per hour in speed in 1904.

His Empire State Express, carved from ivory, is 8 feet long. In 1965, the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln's death, Mooney carved Lincoln's funeral train at age 80.

Union Pacific's Big Boy, railroading's all-time largest steam engine, took nine months and 7,000 pieces to carve. The real-life locomotive weighed 604 tons and had 6-foot diameter drive wheels. Only 25 were built in the 1940s.

The great Northern Mountain 4-8-4 loco, completed in 1933, contained 7,752 pieces and was his favorite work. A Hudson 4-6-4 consisting of 7,332 pieces, took eight months.

At age 72, Mooney began carving his "Great Events in American Railroad History," including the driving of the golden spike, the Civil War's Casey Jones loco and first passenger train, the John Bull.

Other works included an early loco proposed by Isacc Newton, an Aeolipile from Greece dating to 100 AD and Hero's engine from Egypt dating to 250 BC.

A spectacular piece of Mooney's work is a working replica of the steel mill where he worked for 23 years -- the American Sheet & Tin Plate Co. in Dover -- which stood near the Tuscarawas River until it closed in 1931.

The model features 17 articulated men doing various jobs, a sleeping worker and an irate foreman.

Over a two-month span in 1913, Mooney crafted his plier tree -- 511 working pliers carved from one block of wood.

It was displayed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Case University professors studied it and thought its maker must have had an advanced mathematical education. Not so, of course.

When I started visiting Warther's Museum, it was housed in a 12-by-16-foot building built in 1936. His son erected a bigger building in 1963 near Mooney's original shop, and the complex is even larger now.

I was fascinated by Mooney's works 40 years ago, and I continue to be. He was an amazing man, and people with Tuscarawas County ties always will be proud of him.

E-mail: klahmers@recordpub.com

Phone: 330-688-0088 ext. 3155