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A highway bypass is going through the woods he has carved every tray from since 1986. There is a reason he is not starting over somewhere else, and it is the reason his last serving trays are now half price.

2 days ago | Advertorial | Corinne Haldane

Orrin Lindquist found out from a can of orange paint.

Last spring he walked up the ridge behind his barn to look at a cherry the ice had brought down in March. Somebody had been there first. There was an orange X sprayed on the trunk, a numbered metal tag nailed into the end grain, and a line of pink survey ribbon running off through the woods toward the road.

The letter came nine days later. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was taking the family’s 212 acres by eminent domain for a highway bypass that has still not broken ground. The timber rights had already gone to a log broker from out of state. For forty years, when a cherry came down on that ridge, Orrin hooked a chain to it and dragged it home. Now the broker’s crew gets there first. Every downed log is graded, tagged and sold at veneer prices, a good share of it in containers headed overseas.

“I want to be clear, I was not planning on quitting,” he says, flatly, no drama in it. “Nobody asked me a single question. The land changed hands and I found out from a paint can.”

It started with a tornado

Kane, October. The shop is a pole barn behind the house. It smells like sawdust, wood smoke and, faintly, cherry — sweet, almost like the fruit. The workbench is worn pale in two places where his forearms rest. On the wall hang a band saw, a row of carving gouges and one photograph: his grandfather and two men in front of a stand of cherry, taken in 1931, the year the family bought the land. The sign at the edge of town calls Kane the Black Cherry Capital of the World, and for most of Orrin’s life that was simply what people here did. From the window over the bench you can see the ridge. These days you can also see the fence, and the sign in front of it.

“My grandfather bought the woodlot,” Orrin says. “My father logged it, a little at a time, the careful way. I skidded logs out of there with him from the time I was fourteen.” On the evening of May 31, 1985, a tornado came across the ridge and into the south side of Kane. The clocks in town stopped at 8:17. In the woods, cherry and oak went down like matchsticks. The salvage crews took the straight logs. The tops, the twisted trunks and the ones split down the middle got pushed into piles and burned, all that winter. Orrin was twenty-seven.

“I was not saving a tree,” he says. “The tree was already gone. I just could not watch that cherry burn.” In the spring of 1986 he took one trunk home on a borrowed trailer. It sat in the barn for two years drying out. Then he carved a tray out of it for his mother — a Highland cow, like the two his father kept behind the barn. It is on a kitchen counter in Warren and it has been in use every day for thirty-eight years.

Every shape he has carved since is something off that ridge. The Highland cow. The eagle, for the pair of bald eagles that have nested above the Kinzua for as long as he can remember. The trout and the bass, for the creek. And the bulldog, for Moose, who slept under his bench for eleven years.

Two things ruin a wooden serving tray

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “A year later the shine has gone cloudy, it is flaking at the edges and there is a crack across the middle. So you buy another one.”

The first is the lacquer. Tip almost any store-bought wooden tray toward the window and you will see the shine — a sprayed-on coat that makes cheap wood look rich in a photo. Olive oil, lemon, a warm dish and a few trips to the sink, and the coat goes milky. Then it lifts. Then the little clear flakes are on your cheese.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. A freshly fallen cherry trunk is close to half water. Orrin air-dries his wood for months, finishes it in a small drying kiln, then lets it rest again before a gouge touches it. Skip that and the tray looks perfect the day it arrives and shows a hairline crack across a compartment six weeks later for no visible reason.

He throws away one tray in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He does not have the first problem at all, because there is nothing on his trays to peel.

Why a peeling tray cannot be saved

Most weeks somebody turns up at the barn with a tray under their arm and asks him to save it. Never one of his — these are trays people bought in a store or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a year or two. There is a crate in the corner full of the ones he had to hand back: an acacia platter shedding its finish in little white flakes, one gone gray and fuzzy after a few trips through a dishwasher, a bamboo one that came apart in three layers like a wet book, a “rustic” one with a crack straight through the cheese compartment.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is bring them back. “There is nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once lacquer lets go, you would have to sand the whole thing down to bare wood, and a cheap tray does not have that much wood in it to begin with. Once it cracks across, that crack is staying.”

Most of them go home with one of his instead. One serving tray, carved from one block of Pennsylvania black cherry, oiled and nothing else — nothing sprayed on, nothing to flake off two years from now.

What comes off a plastic party platter

In 2013, doctors at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan tested something most of us do without a second thought. They served hot noodle soup in melamine bowls — the hard, shiny plastic most party platters, kids’ plates and divided snack trays are made of — and measured what came out in people’s urine over the next twelve hours.

After the soup from the melamine bowls, the volunteers passed roughly six times as much melamine as after the very same soup from ceramic bowls. Heat is what pulls it out of the plastic, and acid helps it along: hot wings, warm dips, meatballs, tomato sauce, a squeeze of lemon. Exactly what ends up on a party platter.

Every tray gives a little of itself to whatever sits on it. The difference is what it gives. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic does not belong next to your food — not hot, not sour, not at all. Wood gives up nothing you would mind eating.

What makes Orrin’s serving tray different

Carved, not pressed: Every compartment is cut out of the solid block by hand. Nothing glued on, nothing pressed out of a mold.

Rescued, not felled: The wood comes from trees that came down on their own in McKean County — storms, ice, lightning, old age. No living tree is cut to make a tray.

Darkens with the years: Black cherry deepens from warm amber to a rich red-brown in its first year in the light. A tray bought this fall will look better next Thanksgiving than it does the day it arrives.

Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, then a kiln, then rest again before the first cut. This is the step cheap trays skip.

Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No lacquer, no sealant, nothing to chip off into your food.

No two alike: Every tray comes out of a different trunk, so color, weight and grain vary. Yours is the only one like it.

One tray, a dozen jobs

Cheese in one compartment. Crackers in the next. Grapes, nuts and olives in the rest.

Orrin carves the compartments deep and rounds every inside corner, because he knows how a serving tray actually gets used. It goes on the Thanksgiving table with cranberry sauce, pickles and deviled eggs. It goes on the coffee table on game day with nuts and pretzels. It goes in front of the grandkids with apple slices, cheese cubes and the four crackers they are allowed before dinner. On a dresser it holds keys, rings and reading glasses. Same tray, a dozen jobs, and nothing about it says kitchen tool when the guests arrive.

What his customers say

Three reasons there is no next ridge

Everybody who hears about this asks him the same question, and they usually ask it within about ten seconds: why not just buy the wood somewhere else?

There are three answers, and any one of them on its own would be enough.

One: there is no wood he can afford to carve. A cherry that comes down in a storm, split and twisted, used to be worth nothing to anybody. That is why it went on a burn pile and that is why Orrin could have it. To the broker it is now worth veneer money. “I called him about one trunk. One. Lightning took it down in July, split right through, no veneer mill on earth wants it. He wanted eighteen hundred dollars.” Orrin shakes his head. “For a tree I have pulled out of those woods for nothing since I was twenty-seven. At that price a tray costs three hundred dollars. Nobody puts cheese and crackers on a three-hundred-dollar tray.”

Two: his hands are about done. “And to be honest,” he says, turning his right hand over on the bench, “these are about done too. Forty years of gouge work. The thumb does not close the way it used to.” He can still put in a day at the bench. He cannot put in a day and then get up and do it again the next morning. Every tray on the shelf was carved while his hands still worked properly.

Three: there is nobody to hand it to. Orrin is 68 and he works alone. There is no second bench in the barn, no apprentice, no son who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a wooden tray anymore.” What comes out of that barn in a good week is what one man can saw, dry, carve and oil by himself, and one in five of those goes in the burn barrel before it ever gets wrapped. There is no factory behind it and no second batch waiting on a shelf somewhere.

The last thing he still gets to decide

Which brings us to the price, and to the only real choice he has left in any of this.

So he cut every tray that is left in half, from $118 to $59. “Forty years of making something people put food on,” he says. “I want to picture them on a table at Thanksgiving. Not in a storage unit off Route 6 with a padlock on it.” He nods at the window and the fence. “They are getting the woods. Fine. They are not getting these.”

His niece Britta (34) set the small shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I do not know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I was not going to spend another winter standing behind a folding table at a farmers market in the cold. She was right.”

Where can you buy Orrin’s serving tray?

The serving tray is sold only through Cedar & Tin, the small shop Britta runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in a store, not through anybody else. Whatever is still on the shelf when the shop closes on November 30 ships from Britta’s house until it is gone — and then there are no more.

One word of warning: a machine-cut tray stained dark photographs almost exactly like a hand-carved one in a listing photo. The difference only shows when you run a thumb along the inside of a compartment, where the wood either follows the cut of a gouge or the flat path of a router.

Fill it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people at Thanksgiving. If it is not right — the size, the color, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.

This is a paid advertisement for Orrin’s Hand-Carved Serving Tray, sold by Cedar & Tin.

Melamine figures: Wu C. et al., “A crossover study of noodle soup consumption in melamine bowls and total melamine excretion in urine,” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013.