Ex-Ghost Town Alive With Artists, Craftsmen

Sculptor Hobart Brown decided to put his recently completed 7 1/2-foot-tall copper, steel and brass gunfighter in front of his gallery so everyone in the Victorian-style village could see his latest work.

But displaying the creation was not easy.

Gary Edgmon, 34, the town butcher, knew Brown was going to unveil the statue and decided to play a joke on the sculptor.

Edgmon, owner of the 83-year-old Ferndale Meat Co., which specializes in curing meat from nearby ranches, nailed shut the door to Brown’s Hobart Gallery.

Brown, who lives in an apartment upstairs, had to throw a rope out of the top-story window and climb down. Then he pulled the nails out of the doors.

‘A Great Gag’

“It was a great gag. People around here are always pulling practical jokes on one another,” said Brown, who rides around Ferndale on his pentacycle, a homemade five-wheel contraption.

He placed a $12,000 price tag on “The Gunslinger,” the biggest sculpture Brown’s ever done.

Ferndale is a village of artists and craftsmen located 15 miles south of Eureka in Humboldt County. It was the next thing to a ghost town when Brown moved here in 1964.

“I was starving to death as a sculptor in Los Angeles,” he recalled. “I thought I might as well starve to death up here where the air is clear.”

He paid $10,000 for his gallery and apartment. The 90-year-old building had been a saloon, hotel, brewery and brothel. Several artists and artisans followed suit in the next few years, buying the old vacant buildings on Ferndale’s Main Street, settling around the sculptor’s gallery.

“You can credit Hobart with Ferndale’s renaissance,” blacksmith Joe Koches, 48, said.

Personalized Sculptures

Brown has created small, personalized sculptures for every business in town. The one he did for Carlos Benemann’s bookstore, for example, shows Benemann on a tottering ladder, a book tucked under one arm and between his legs, reaching for yet another book.

Brown’s studio, filled with acetylene torches and other paraphernalia for his welded works of art, is next to his living room. His living room is a clutter of sculpted pieces and photographs, one showing him wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar in his bathtub. Another shows him holding a spear.

Also decorating the room are preserved fish heads, barnacles, glass floats, a faded Egyptian tapestry, orange crates filled with sea gull feathers, horses’ hoofs and other memorabilia. Suits of armor dangle from the ceiling. A jewel glows from a cow’s skull. Eight chairs are set around a wine-stained banquet table.

Hobart Brown (his father named him after Hobart, Okla., where his parents were married) is the originator of the annual 34-mile “animated sculpture” race in which various man-powered contraptions make their way from Arcata to Ferndale. First held on Mother’s Day, 1969, the race--on a course over sand, sloughs, mud flats, river and sea--attracts entrants from as far away as Japan.

Brown’s entry in this year’s race, held last Memorial Day weekend, was a 20-foot-high, 40-foot-long, 6,000-pound steel and Styrofoam creation called the Quagmire Queen.

That Sinking Sensation

Eighteen men and women joined the sculptor inside, pumping an intricate drive system. Crossing a bay, the Quagmire Queen rolled over and momentarily submerged. But all aboard were unhurt and the contraption, afloat on two pontoons, resurfaced. Hobart and his crew turned it right-side up and continued, finishing 10th out of 65 entries.

Brown, a philosopher as well as a sculptor, is brimming with sayings, such as:

How to get along with teen-agers?

Don’t ask them to do anything.

How to be successful? Accept failure.

How not to be lonely? Lower your standards.

“I know all these things, because I have lived them myself,” he said.

And the lesson of Ferndale, he added, is:

“If a town is in trouble, get an artist.”