A lead from Texas Country Reporter

Texas Country Reporter episode 1798 has a story on James Evans, a present day Big Bend photographer with a studio in Marathon.  TCR tells us about lamp shade photographs that were first made, promoted, and sold by earlier area photographer W. D. Smithers.  The Smithers lampshades are now highly valued collector items.  Evans is now doing lamp shades in the Smithers style. 

http://www.texasescapes.com/ClayCoppedge/W-D-Smithers-Ways-of-Border.htm

https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/photopublic/fullDisplay.cfm?CollID=15885

https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00286

https://www.jameshevans.com/

Not closely related but episode 1794 had a story on the W. R. Dallas rustic furniture business.  An old business that is being perpetuated by a present day person.

Not closely related, but I'm reminded of my first exposure to the rustic cedar furniture that was used in the original Indian Lodge CCC project in the Davis Mountains.  A 1960s Indian Lodge expansion used replicas; I have done a bit of research on that (REALLY beautiful) rustic furniture.  I eventually learned that the CCC built a furniture factory near Bastrop to make use of local cedar wood; that CCC factory provided cedar products for many CCC projects of the period (1930s).  During probably the 1970s and 1980s, a Smithville business, Texas Cedar Products, sold vacation cabins and some cedar furniture out of Smithville.  I have a treasured coffee table that we have had about 40 years.  And Texas Cedar Products built my now burned guest house.  There is currently a cedar lumber business, Wampler, operating near Bastrop that supplied cabinet lumber for our remodeled bathroom.  More recently, Wampler supplied the wood for construction of burial boxes for both Jean and her sister.

https://wamplermfg.com/

May  29, 2022

I recently had the very great pleasure of staying in one of the old CCC cabins up hill from the Chisos Mountains Basin Lodge.  I was surprised to find apparently original pine rustic furniture.  I theorize that it may have been made in the same CCC Bastrop furniture factory.  I would love to learn more of that facility.  Location, projects worked on, time period, etc.