Sandhills Hatter
By Jerry Wilson
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Arthur isn't the kind of town where you'd expect to find a professional hatter. Omaha, maybe, or possibly Ogallala. But Arthur, population 129 and counting down?
It's not that Arthur isn't a nice place to live. It is. It's a tidy town in the southwest edge of the Sandhills, quiet except during rodeo days in August. Entering Arthur from north or south on Highway 61, you descend to a shady, green oasis. Sandy dunes rise on every side, shielding the town from winter winds. The most striking feature of the village center is a grove of towering cottonwoods.
Arthur, named for 1880s President Chester A. Arthur, is not only the county seat; it's the only town in Arthur County, population 400 or so. The courthouse is modest, but the high school on the edge of town more impressive. Out front waits a top-flight touring bus that hauls the Wolves in style to six-man football games up to 200 miles away.
Down the street from the school, across from the swimming pool, stands the Pilgrim Holiness Church, one of the Arthur structures built of straw bales 75 years ago, now a museum. There's a small tree farm –– a welcome contribution in these almost treeless hills. Main Street has a gas station, a body shop, Rose Saddlery, Graham's Ranch Supply, an art gallery, a fledgling co-op grocery, a meat market, a bank in an 18 by 26-foot concrete block building, another museum in a former courthouse that's not much bigger than the bank, and the Long Branch Tavern. If you know where to look, there's even a motel, the Bunk House. But that you have to find for yourself.
The other business is the hatter. Probably every man who lives in Arthur, and some of the women, own a western hat. But that's a small market. We'd heard about Arthur's hatter, James Marshall, and decided that as one of 40 or so professional hat makers left in the United States, and the only one in Nebraska, he deserved a visit.
Marshall told us by phone that we could get good burgers at the Long Branch, and a room at the Bunk House. It was dark when we pulled into town, but in a village of 129, how could you miss the motel? Easy. No lights, no sign out front. Somebody told us to stop at Carol and Ed Cooney's house a couple blocks up the street. “My son, he's got a sign,” Ed said, “but he never gets it up.”
“Take number two,” Carol said. “The door is open.” We found five rooms sheltered into a sandy hill, a kind of architectural integrity Frank Lloyd Wright might have enjoyed.
The sign over the Long Branch reads “We only look expensive.” That assertion could be debated, but the essence of the claim we found to be true. Every head turned, as they will, when a stranger enters a small town gathering place in the dark of night. But we were warmly welcomed, and everybody had a story about James Marshall. There were tales of his rodeo days, and about the bull that forced a change of profession.
That happened three years ago, Marshall told us at his shop on the north edge of town next morning. “I got in a wreck with a bull that broke my back. I wasn't even riding at the time. I was in an alley, sorting bulls. He got me down and just kept pounding me. He broke two vertebrae, all but three ribs, punctured a lung. I guess they flew me to Omaha on a Lear jet. I woke up eight days later.”
Besides riding bulls, Marshall had built fences, and before that managed a ranch in neighboring Garden County on land now owned by Ted Turner. Marshall was 42 when the bull got him. He had a wife and three kids to think about, and none of the occupations he knew would work anymore for a guy so battered. “I couldn't take the pain,” he said.
So he started using his head. He knew first hand how important headgear is to cowboys, even the drugstore kind, and he knew that good, custom-fitted hats were hard to come by. He went to Idaho Falls, Idaho, and trained with a hatter for two weeks, then found a woman in Twin Bridges, Mont., who agreed to help. “I watched her for a day or two, then she said ‘go home and build a few hats.' I made seven or eight, then went back and trained a couple more weeks, then came home and started building hats,” Marshall said.
The quality –– and the price –– of a cowboy hat has a lot to do with the amount of beaver hair, Marshall said. He makes hats in three grades: Hats of 100 percent beaver felt go for $399, 50 percent beaver hats sell for $299, and 10 percent for $199. The rest is sheep wool or hair from rabbits or other animals. Regardless of the content, the hats are custom-fitted and custom-built to fit one particular head.
Marshall himself wears a custom-designed blue shirt with the round bulge of a snuff can in the pocket, jeans held up by a prize bull-riding buckle from the rodeo finals in Ogallala, red and black boots, and on his balding head, a top-quality, custom-crafted black hat. Like every hat he makes, the owner's name is embossed in gold on the sweatband.
Marshall gets unshaped hat bodies from a manufacturer in Winchester, Tenn. “They look like an old Jed Clampett hat when I get them,” he said, “a raw beaver body. I sand and iron it 'til it's soft, then dye the material and shape and finish the hat.” Most of the hats he builds are black.
He was finishing number 185 when we visited. “I've done no advertising, and I'm now 68 hats behind,” he said. A map on the wall has pins in 18 states where hats have gone, including one to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a 50 th birthday gift from a political supporter. “I had to buy an international map the other day,” Marshall added. “I sold two hats in Denmark.”
If everything goes right, Marshall can build a hat a day. “But yesterday was a zoo,” he said. “I was measuring heads right and left, and a couple of guys came in to pick up their hats.”
Marshall Custom Hats are built in the west room of a three-room building next to Chuckwagon Meats. The middle room is the show room, where Marshall also sells vests, cowboy ties, palm leaf hats from Guatemala, and manufactured hats that go for a lot less than $400. In the east room, James' wife, Joy, organizes conferences and does small business consulting through the University of Nebraska. She also helped Arthur's co-op grocery get off the ground.
The slot outside where James parks is labeled “Handicap: Bald headed parking only.” A sign inside reads, “Caution: Men at Work. Women work all the time. Men have to put up signs when they work.”
The action is in the building room. Rows of hardwood heads replicate the various sizes and shapes of human heads. Steamers hiss and presses wait to play their parts in turning a Jed Clampett hat into a Jeb Bush.
The process is deceptively simple. First Marshall measures the customer's head with a copper band, which also conforms to fit the shape. “You'd be surprised at the different shapes of people's heads,” he said. “One side might even be sticking out.” Marshall traces the basic head shape onto paper, then cuts a rigid foam block to match, so that when it's finished, the hat will “fit the head like a glove.”
Marshall holds the limp hat body over a steamer to soften the felt. Then, based on the desired crown height and which of 23 specific hat designs the customer wants, he fits it over the wooden block that most closely resembles the rigid foam crown, works out the wrinkles by hand, and sets it aside to cure on the wooden block.
When the felt has set, Marshall steams, rolls and irons the brim, then lets that cure overnight. Next he sands the crown with four increasingly-fine grades of paper, finishes the operation with a hot iron, then puts the hat on a sand press with a heating element that “cooks” the brim to flatten it and make it stiff. Trim is sewed around the brim, and the signature sweatband of goat leather goes inside. Marshall then steams the brim and begins the final process of hand shaping the entire hat.
Besides building hats, James Marshall cleans, blocks, reshapes and renovates old hats. “With proper care, a good hat should last 15 to 20 years,” he said.
As we were going out, an elderly cowboy named Clay Powers came in. “When I got this hat, I thought it fit,” Powers said. But it's just not right. I was wondering if you could maybe stretch it or something and make it fit.”
“Did you get it here?” Marshall asked.
“Well, no.”
“Well, there you go,” Marshall said with a chuckle. “Here, let's see what we can do.”