At his workbench in his Yonges Island wood shop, Tom Boozer sits with his draw knife and begins to carve a crude wooden block.
With each pull of the knife, long strips of wood peel away until a familiar form begins to take shape—the body of a duck—one of the more than 3,200 decoys he’s fashioned in his world-renowned career as a woodcarver.
The hand tool itself is over 200 years old, and he sharpens it daily with a whetstone and leather strop. The wood—the rare but prized Atlantic white cedar—he logged from the swamps and roughed out with a hatchet. He custom-built the workbench.
“It’s preservation of history. With using these tools and techniques, everything you’re doing is the way it was done 200 years ago,” Boozer says. “A Skil saw will cut through whatever you want to cut through. With a hand tool, you’ve got to work the wood the way the wood grew.”
After he fashions the body and hollows it out with a fishtail chisel, he carves one of eight different heads, including preeners, feeders, stalkers and sleepers. Then he paints the feathers using special paints and painting techniques so that the wood comes to resemble a wood duck or a mallard or a blue-winged teal or whatever his client has commissioned.
1 of 2
The art of the decoy
Boozer’s decoys are prized by collectors and duck hunters for their lifelike appearance on the water and their sheer beauty.
Photo by Mic Smith
2 of 2
A craftsman at work
With 60 years of experience, vintage tools and dedication to his craft, Tom Boozer turns ordinary blocks of wood into functional objects of art.
Photo by Mic Smith
A meticulous craftsman who’s also an avid duck hunter—he has a sleeping black duck on his shelf that’s been on every duck hunt with him since 1970—Boozer has perfected his process for nearly sixty years, ever since he learned as a 10-year-old boy how to do it from a boat builder named Olin Ballentine.
“He would come to my grandaddy’s store on Saturdays and tell tall tales and carve heads. I took right up with him,” Boozer says. “He was a nut about the basics. I made the first bird, and he said, ‘Boy, no self-respecting duck is gonna stool to that thing. You gotta round them up. There ain’t no square edges on a duck!’ And when I’m sitting on the bench to this day, I’m hearing: ‘There ain’t no square edges on a duck!’ He stayed with me.”
A few years ago, Boozer began to make wooden turkey decoys on the suggestion of legendary DNR game warden Ben McMoise. The models are so popular with collectors that the National Wild Turkey Federation ordered 28 of them for their 50th anniversary celebration, and Boozer also has a pair of turkeys on display in the South Carolina State Museum.
In addition to decoys and ducks, Boozer also makes dioramas and model ships for museums and private collectors. One of his next projects is a diorama of the Georgetown harbor, working to construct the scene from a collection of photographs by Frank Tarbox in the early 1900’s. But perhaps his most popular piece is a model of Jenny, the shrimp boat from Forrest Gump, which Boozer builds from the cypress boards of the real boat in the film.
“I tell you, right after the movie, them things were hot,” he says. “And every time they re-run Forrest Gump, I’ll get a call.”
___
Get more
For more on Tom Boozer’s handcrafted decoys or to schedule a visit to his workshop, call (843) 889-3390.