Fountain
He had worked for four months, piling up some 500 hours of serious labor in the forest where he gathered the great pine trees and then back at his rustic woodworking shop in this town. He cut and shaped and drilled amid swirling clouds of chain saw fuel, sawdust and sweat.
And then, as the summer of 1990 faded and fall crept in, he stood back and stared with some awe at what he had created, a gargantuan piece of work that towered 20 feet into the sky, crushing the rich Colorado earth beneath its 9,500 pounds.
Dwayne Simmons had built a chair.
It was a rocking chair, and it had no equal. For more than a decade it stood alone in the world of furniture as a monument to, well, really big chairs.
But then, in Texas of all places, along came a bigger rocking chair, a behemoth that stands nearly 6 feet taller than Simmons’ chair, although it weighs a mere 5,672 pounds. It was built in 2002 by Larry Dennis.
Reached at their Texas Hill Country Furniture store in Lipan, Larry’s wife, Sherry, said: “Larry builds rocking chairs, you know, and one day he just said, ‘We need to build a really large one.’ And he did.”
It did not, however, tarnish the work of Simmons, who, despite the one-upmanship in Texas, remains the first guy to build a really big rocking chair.
Simmons knew early in his life that something like this might happen. When he was 5, his mother and father would read “Goldilocks and The Three Bears” to him.
“I’d look at the pictures of the three bears in the house and I’d think, ‘That’s really nice furniture,”‘ he said. “They’d leave the ‘Three Bears,’ and I’d go through it just to look at the drawings of the furniture. It really got my interest.”
Simmons is 59 now, with hands as strong as wood clamps and a head full of wavy white hair. He has, he figures, built “thousands and thousands” of pieces of furniture, most of them the rough-hewn mountain style that adorn cabins, pieces crafted from timber he gathered in the mountains.
He works the same way today, his Wilderness Furniture shop and showroom nestled inside two remodeled chicken coops where as a kid he gathered eggs on the family’s ranch.
“As far back as I can remember, I’d be in the mountains with my chain saw, gathering dead trees and hauling them back to town,” he said. “I loved the feel of the wood, the look of the wood, the color of the wood.”
So what’s with the 9,500-pound chair?
Well, the idea struck him as a way to attract business to his shop, which can be seen from Interstate 25, just across Fountain Creek.
“But I was making furniture to make a living, to provide for my family,” he said. “I didn’t have time or money to actually do it.”
A few years later, in 1989, he mentioned the idea to a friend and customer, Christopher Jafferis, who had a furniture store in Estes Park. Jafferis thought a giant rocking chair would be a great attraction. He hired Simmons, and the work began.
From the mountains came the big timbers, trees that had stood for years and then died, from drought or disease or bugs or lightning. Simmons and a few hired hands hauled the trees to his shop. The big chair, he calculated, would be precisely six times larger than the regular rocking chairs he had been building for years.
“Everything times six,” he said. “It was an easy way to remember it.”
Cutting was done with chain saws. Holes were drilled with a two-man, gas-powered posthole digger. Simmons, who was paid about $12 an hour for his work, hauled the big chair to Estes Park and plopped it in front of Jafferis’ store. The townsfolk gawked.
A few months later, though, Jafferis became embroiled in a dispute with Estes Park building inspectors. They said the chair had to go.
Simmons, using his brother’s hay truck, hauled the chair back to Fountain. It ended up on display outside a tack and feed store.
“The guy wanted it for a month,” Simmons said. “It stayed for 10 years.”
In 1999, Jafferis sold the chair to Tom Doxey, owner of the Apple Shed restaurant along Colorado 115 in Penrose. There it rests today, in the dirt parking lot, attracting all kinds of attention. You can, if you’d like, even eat a slice of homemade apple pie on the picnic table that sits under the chair.
“I drive by and look at it every once in a while,” said Simmons, taking a break inside his shop, sawdust on his trousers and a smile on his face. “I guess I’m proud of it. I’ve been lucky, you know. I’ve spent my life doing something I really love. I found my talent.”
With a little help, of course, from a great big bear, a middle-sized bear and a little teeny tiny bear.
Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
