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Tom McLaughlin's route to his treetop woodworking shop was anything but, direct. It took him from a Massachusetts vocational school to the University of Lowell for a degree in mathematics, then through a three-year seminary program, and finally to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where he was introduced to a man named Pug Moore. Vocational school had given McLaughlin the basics of woodworking and hand-tool use, but it also convinced him that carpentry would be a life of drudgery. In Moore's shop, he found something far more appealing, a skilled furniture making mentor who had run a successful business for more than four decades.

Moore was loaded with orders for 18th-century-style furniture, but at 73 he was slowing down. He had shed employees until he was running a solo operation, and by the time McLaughlin met him, his backlog of orders stretched out two or three years. McLaughlin asked him for a job. Although Moore refused to hire him immediately, McLaughlin persisted. He'd stop by the shop, and ask Moore to critique his work. Eventually, Moore relented. McLaughlin stayed for three years.

ACCIDENTAL ENCOUNTERS
The meeting with Pug Moore was the first of several serendipitous encounters - providential events, as Mclaughlin thinks of them - that magically seemed to steer his life in the right direction at important crossroads. The next one landed him at an idyllic shop with treetop views of the New Hampshire countryside.

How that all unfolded is as complicated as it is unlikely. McLaughlin's father-in-law, a longtime summer resident of Canterbury, was in Massachusetts when he ran into someone who also happened to be from Canterbury. In the course of their conversation, the stranger, a man named Chance Anderson, mentioned that he had a woodworking shop. Would McLaughlin, Anderson wondered, be interested in using it? McLaughlin and his wife, still in North Carolina, were anxious to return to New England, and the deal was too good to pass up. So McLaughlin took over the top floor of a barn-like structure attached to Anderson's work-in-progress house. Over the years, Anderson's compound had spread across a rural hilltop to include a house with a series of attached appendages that offered workshop space for McLaughlin as well as others. For McLaughlin, getting from his house elsewhere in town to his new hilltop workshop could be trying. Anderson's property is half a mile up a steep hill over a road that alternates between ragged gravel and gravel. Still, there is a payoff in gaining the high ground, and McLaughlin has been able to pay his rent either by making furniture for Anderson or by helping with projects around the compound.

BEST VIEW IN TOWN
With windows across the entire southwest wall, the 1,200-sq.-ft. room that ultimately became McLaughlin's shop had ample natural light but not quite enough for Anderson. When Anderson bought the place, he added a barrel vault in the ceiling in the space above. The changes make the most of a giant semicircular window in the upper part of the wall. On a winter's night, McLaughlin can see the lights of Concord a dozen miles to the south. In summer, he sees the leaf}' canopy of the southern New Hampshire hillsides nearby. Working at the bench with the windows thrown open to air and sunlight is one of summer's many pleasures.

WORK IN THE CLASSIC STYLE
One consequence of moving into Anderson's workshop was an excess of woodworking equipment. By the time McLaughlin took up residence, Anderson had turned his attention to stonework. He no longer needed the American 36-in. bandsaw, the 12-ft. belt-run lathe, or his thickness planer. McLaughlin bought the bandsaw and learned to work around the equipment he didn't need. McLaughlin continues to work in the 18th-century style, aided on occasion by templates and patterns he inherited from Pug's shop. While he appreciates the design sensibilities of Federal, Chippendale, and Queen Anne furniture, his own style looks more contemporary than the originals on which they are based.

New Hampshire has proved fertile ground for McLaughlin's furniture making career. After returning to New England and settling in, he became a member of the New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association. This influential group of the state's top craft woodworkers conducts an annual exhibit and auction featuring work in a range of styles, contemporary as well as classic. Along with the Guild of New Hampshire Woodworkers and the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, the organization is responsible for elevating the profile of top furniture makers like McLaughlin as well as mentoring woodworkers still learning the craft. And that's the part of the equation that McLaughlin knows well. His own apprenticeship with an older and experienced master was a turning point in his career. He's only too glad to return the favor.