MANSFIELD — On a cold Monday morning recently I drove out to the Carousel Works’ large unassuming building a few miles north of downtown, just off Olivesburg Road.
I had never seen the place, and curiosity and intrigue spurred the visit. Inside I met with owner Art Ritchie who, along with Dan Jones, was also the founder of Carousel Works more than 30 years ago.
“So is a carousel the same as a merry-go-round?” I asked him, using the term more common in my native England.
“Doesn’t matter,” Art said with a wave of his hand. “It’s all the same. Carousel gets spelled different, too, but that’s O.K.”
As you may have noticed, Carousel Works has just the one “r” while the Richland Carrousel Park, favoring the original French spelling, has two.
I was in a large open factory with high ceilings like an aircraft hanger, broken into different sections to put together all the necessary parts of a full-sized wooden carousel. There’s room, too, for a working carousel to be completely set up and tested.
This is the only place in the world with the ability to construct a wooden carousel all the way through, from design to installation. Carousels built here have ended up in places as far apart as Finland, France and South Korea.
This was a relatively quiet day, they told me, but there were artists painting backdrops, a machine worker creating basic animal shapes from blocks of wood, and hunched-over hand carvers working in minute detail on horse heads and bodies.
In here they design and build wooden carousels from scratch, but they also restore old parts.
Some of the horse figures in here waiting to be worked on date from as far back as the 1880s, carver and artist Tim Gorka explained as he took me around.
“Those guys, those carvers back then,” he told me, “they were the first. You can look (at these figures) and see the speed and dexterity they worked with. It was a production line.”
Not all carousels are for parks and zoos. Some are destined for cruise ships and this introduces unique engineering challenges.
“There’s a lot that can go wrong,” Art explained. “It’s an entirely different thing. The first one we did was 12 years ago, and it’s like we had to reinvent the wheel. You know, you don’t want to roll the whole ship over and have a Poseidon Adventure on your hands.
“They wanted it on the top deck,” he continued. “Well, that’s not gonna work. We ended up going 17 stories down. Even then, we had a half-a-million dollar chandelier on the ceiling below to worry about. And they insisted we couldn’t go over seven decibels of sound.”
Art, originally from Connecticut, started Carousel Works in 1986, before moving the operation to Mansfield in 1988.
“I started carving in ‘73,” he told me. “And I found that when you carve something, somebody will want to buy it. I carved everything. Like 12-foot-tall giraffes, and carousel figures.”
It occurred to him it was too bad you couldn’t do more than just work on the figures; it would be good to make the whole thing. The manufacture of wooden carousels stopped by 1933 with The Depression, he told me, and this is what he wanted to bring back.
“We’re an assembly-line factory,” he said, looking around us, “but a pre-Henry Ford factory. Here, everyone can do anything. These people are true artists, trained artists. It’s like a turn-of-the-century craft shop. I mean, I don’t even care if you can read, as long as you can carve.”
I continued my tour of the Works and met Scott, who showed me the machines that take blocks of wood and turn them into basic animal parts.
“The machines do the work of getting rid of the wood on the block,” Scott explained, “but then (the parts) go to the carvers. They do the magic.”
