One restored coach was valued at more than $100,000. Customers are lined up for three years. 

 

 

A & D Buggy Shop sells a variety of vehicles including a replica of this Pony Express coach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

drawn from memory

Daniel Raber was beard to belly as he folded himself over a black metal box in the shadowy Holmes County workshop.

He could hear his father’s voice telling him to forget the all but imperceptible blemish in the paint, that it was costing him valuable time. But Raber, the third generation in the family buggy business, had no choice. If he didn’t tediously buff the imperfection from the carriage body, it would smolder in his mind for weeks.

A few years after his death, his father’s presence still looms as large as the rotund silvery stove that has warmed A & D Buggy Shop for decades. Along a winding gravel driveway, tucked between red barns and well grazed pastures, the father and son had poured themselves into decaying frames of wood and steel. Here, century-old carriages and sleighs, carted from forgotten corners of family barns, were reborn.

The relics came in tattered, cracked and rusted, “pretty rickety-rackety,” Raber said. Some were much worse. But they could have left hitched to the finest horses, if the owners didn’t consider a dusty road blasphemous to the craftsmen’s labor.

Inside the small but rambling shop, Raber is now on his own except for a dog, Sparky, rustling somewhere out of sight. Raber is the blacksmith, welder, woodworker, painter and upholsterer. As he works, the memory of an assembly line of Amish buggies that once kept his father employed still hangs in his mind.

“An Amish buggy, basically they’re all the same,” he said. “(Dad) would build 10 of them in a crack.”

An 18th century sleigh — resembling a rocking horse but with the face of a wild-eyed lion — is something different.

“That was a weird sleigh,” Raber said, recalling the restoration.

It would be easy to label Raber an artist, if only he didn’t refer to hundreds of hours immersed in fine craftsmanship as “just my everyday job.” (Painting “is a bear,” but upholstery “is like putting icing on a cake.”) In this part of northeast Ohio, there is little romance in shaping metal and wood. There is simply honest work and a decent wage.

To maintain tradition, a diesel generator drones in the absence of power lines. There was a time when Raber himself traveled by true horse power, but “the other way is faster,” he said, nodding to his van outside. In truth, A & D Buggy Shop is no more conspicuous than the bevy of neighbors who sell sweet potatoes, rocking chairs or baskets. But the simplicity is misleading.

The one-man operation surrounded by chickens and cows and numbered, nameless roads has been sought out by clients in seven countries as well as a few dozen states. One restored coach was valued at more than $100,000. Customers are lined up for three years.

Most of the demand is likely due to Raber’s profound ability to restore not a machine, but a memory, to give color to an old family photograph. But even as he fusses over every detail of a carriage or sleigh, once the customer is pleased, he admits he doesn’t think much of what happens to it.

“They could leave it out in the rain,” he said with an easy shrug.

For Raber, the memories lie in his labor. He talked about putting a tool away in a certain place, “because that’s where dad used to keep it.” Then he sighed and quickly returned to work.

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