About Us
I grew up…
…in West Central Wisconsin. After graduating from High School in Eau Claire, I moved to Newport, Rhode Island to work and study at the International Yacht Restoration School. I had always had an interest in woodworking and assumed that if I learned how to build wooden boats, those skills would be relevant and transferable in helping me find a career in woodworking. The rules, skills, and results of traditional wooden boat construction totally captivated me, and my professional focus has remained on wooden boats since.
I was also lucky enough to spend a winter working with Jack McGreivey, owner of McGreivey's Canoe Shop in Cato, New York, restoring wood/canvas canoes. I worked for two seasons as the boatbuilder-in-residence at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. The Adirondack Museum is an incredible institution, boasting one of the country's most complete collections of small craft, complimented by one of the country's best museum curators, Hallie Bond. Working with Hallie remains a highlight of my professional experiences.
I moved back to badger state in 2004, to Madison, Wisconsin. There I established J.W. Swan Boatworks. I spent the Spring semester of 2005 working as an Artisan-in-Residence in the UW-Madison Department of Art. Working with a blend of undergraduate and graduate students, we built a Maine Coast Peapod. Interacting with both students and professors was a nice change of pace from the relative isolation of working alone in my shop, and kindled my desire to include instruction as a focus of my business.
In the summer of 2005, my wife Charmaine and I moved north to Ashland, Wisconsin. She had just finished Graduate School and we were both eager to strike North for Lake Superior. In the fall of 2006 I received a grant from the Center for Wooden Boats, in Seattle Washington, to travel to Norheimsund, Norway to spend six weeks at the Hardanger Fartoyvernsenter, a dynamic waterfront boatyard campus focusing on keeping alive the relationship between a village and its place on the water.
In 2008, I was a summer instructor at the Great Lakes Boatbuilding School, in Cedarville, MI. It is a remarkable facility, with a well honed focus on vocational training for tomorrow’s workforce.
In 2012, I built my boat shop out on our land, just outside of Washburn, WI. It is both my sanctuary and base camp. And while I mostly work at my shop, I have had some great opportunities to pitch in on some great local projects. I was the lead boatbuilder on the cubby label skiff replica project at Bayfield Maritime Museum. I documented an historic lake superior fishing skiff and then led a group of volunteers building a replica. She was launched in 2016 and is now on display. Most recently, I was the consulting boatbuilder for stabilizing the Twilite, an historic fish tug on display at the Little Sand Bay campus in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
From large sailboat rebuilds to wood/canvas canoes, and most everything in between, I’ve now accumulated close to twenty years of experience building and restoring wooden boats. Recently, I began to saw and mill custom boat timber for both my projects and other project across the country and offer custom milling services in addition to my boatwork services.
I feel very grateful for the opportunities and experiences I have had so far. And now looking forward, I’m very excited for what the coming years will bring for Swan & Sons.