Currituck Carver

Chandler Sawyer is strictly a Currituck-school carver. He admires the folk-art quality of the wooden ducks produced in the first half of the 20th century, before store-bought plastic decoys, when hundreds of hunters in Currituck County fashioned their own simple decoys out of juniper. A duck hunter himself, he feels connected to those back-in-the-day carvers, and is one of a dozen or so left in Currituck who make decoys the old fashioned way, like his great, great grandfather Bob Morse did on Church’s Island, with a hatchet and carving knives. He fashions ruddy ducks, canvasbacks, and buffleheads with the classic Currituck paddle tail, no eyes, the body resembling a working man’s dead-rise boat.

His affection for this land and surrounding waters is rooted deep; his family has lived in Currituck since 1714. For Sawyer, a self-described lover of history, decoy carving is a way to keep the past alive: “Who else is going to hold on to it, if not me?”

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