By Susan and Michael Stahl
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Raymond “Bud” Overholzer, whose last name means “dweller beyond the woods,” was born in 1890 and grew up in Paulding County, Ohio. He ended up marrying his elementary-school teacher, Hortense Brown, who was 23 years his senior, and sometime in the 1920s he brought her and his mother to Lake County, where he made his living mainly by catering to wealthy sportsmen who came for the copious game and fish the region has always offered. When steelhead or salmon were running the narrow, serpentine Pere Marquette, sport fishermen would hire him to take them out in his scow, which he maneuvered with a long pole. Hunters would hire him to help track game through the forests, such as they were: by then the lumber companies had just about finished harvesting the last of the giant virgin white pines that had dominated the area. The thriving towns that had sprung up around that industry–like those that had sprung up around the coal and marl industries in the county–melted away as soon as the raw materials were gone, leaving behind only stumps and legends.
Overholzer learned taxidermy from a man who’d once taken him and his wife in for several weeks during a snowstorm, then started making bases for trophies out of the scraps of trees–roots, branches, stumps–left behind by the loggers. Most people familiar with his legacy say that the devastation of the pines by the lumber barons touched him deeply, stirred a compulsive desire to salvage whatever remained. He would find a severed root or limb during one of his fishing or hunting forays, drag it home, remove the bark, sand it, and turn it into anything from a door handle to a piece of furniture. He would then burnish the piece with deerskin, heat from which would cause the sap to rise to the surface, giving the wood a lustrous amber finish. “My husband had three ideals underlying his work,” his wife said in an interview after his death. “Each piece had to be done by hand from Michigan white pine, had to be useful, and must cost nothing.”
The peculiar shapes inherent in the wood have inspired lots of interpretation, creating a lore within the shrine that’s continually evolving. “Some people see a squirrel running down the leg of this table,” Warner says. He also points out a mouse poised between the runners of Hortense’s rocking chair and an anchor in the chandelier.
As stipulated in Hortense’s will, the lodge and all of Bud’s artwork still belong to Boysville. “They lease the building and artifacts from us for a nominal amount,” says David Jablonski, Boysville’s director of public relations, “very nominal–next to nothing.”
