 | UMFK - Edmond and Brian J. Theriault have been making traditional snowshoes for over thirty years. Brian decided to make the DVD/VHS video to detail the dying art form. The video shows how the Theriaults get ash trees in the woods, cow hides, and make traditional snowshoes. The Theriaults make their own molds and built most of their own tools. They cut up the ash trees into strips of wood for the frames. They also take the cowhides, fleshing the skin and scraping the hair off, and then cut and size the rawhide for weaving. By putting a small piece of rawhide and two sticks together, the Theriaults get transportation. They call their snowshoes 'usable art.' Visit Site
| | Brian has been making snowshoes for almost thirty years. He began learning with his father, who decided to learn for himself, because there was no money to buy snowshoes for his eleven children. Edmond picked up rudiments of snowshoe making from older snowshoe makers, then began to experiment with how to make them better. For two decades Brian and his father, Edmond have turned out hundreds of pairs of snowshoes. They tan, scrape and prepare the cowhide leather for the harnesses and rawhide for webbing. They split and bend the black ash, using molds which they have refined for almost thirty years. They have worked on improving the webbing and have created some original patterns based on older local models. Visit Site |  |  | These days, traveling over or through snow with snowmobiles or plows is easy. But it wasn’t always so, and during a fierce Maine winter people still had to get around, often in waist-deep snow. Brian Theriault and his father Edmond of Eagle Lake have been making traditional snowshoes out of white ash and rawhide for over 25 years, giving timber cutters and Maine Guides a means of getting around regardless of the terrain or the amount of snow on the ground. As the elder Theriault says, “just a little strip of wood, a piece of skin, and you have transportation.” Visit Site
| | Snowshoes have been around for thousands of years. NECN's Amy Sinclair heads to Eagle Lake, Maine to meet Brian Theriault, a man who makes snowshoes the old-fashioned way for customers who depend on them. As one of eleven children, Brian was expected to make his own snowshoes. So began a life long partnership with his father - resurrecting and trying to improve upon the backwoods art form. It takes 10 hours, spread over weeks, to make a pair of snowshoes, but Brian doesn't consider it work. For him, it is a way of connecting with his ancestry. Visit Site |  |
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