From John Hopewell and other contributors to the VA-GGS mailing list, April, 2003.
The Gloucester Leg Stool has an interesting history of its own.
A retired northern businessman named Percy Watt Hood came to Gloucester in the late 1920s or early 1930s and was a friend of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who had just begun the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. Mr. Hood discovered an old leg stool somewhere in the county (I'm recalling this from DEEP memory now, as I remember its being told me as a child) and was intrigued by it. Researchers in Williamsburg helping the CW foundation told him it was a Gout Stool, to elevate and rest the tortured leg of men suffering from gout in the 18th century.
Casting about for a good retired hobby, he started up what eventually would be called the Gloucester Leg Stool Shop that was located on the northern side of the Gloucester Court Circle (past the site of Tucker's Store to the northwest). Mr. Hood hired Walter Preston "Scrapper" Day, a local man who was an excellent woodworker, to cut out and put together the leg stools, using the original one as the guide. Someone else did the upholstery while Mr. Hood handled the business end of sales and shipping.
The shop flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, after WW2, Scrapper went to work for the Chesapeake Corporation (pulp mill) in West Point, VA, and Roger Moorman (also the local Scoutmaster) took over the making of the furniture, and continued doing the woodworking for several years after Mr. Hood's death, as Roger bought the business from the estate, or perhaps inherited it, as the Hoods had no children. (By the way, both Mr. and Mrs. Hood were invalids and incapacitated toward the end of their lives, and they both died the same evening, a couple hours apart.)
William Jeff Booth & Jenny Booth upholstered many of those little stools, covering them with leather or tapestry, using brass round head upholstry tacks lined up shoulder to shoulder all around the edge. Jeff Booth, who also taught at the Cappahosic school, became noted for his woodworking and furniture skills, as did his apprentices, Irving and John Driver, who later operated the Driver Brothers furniture shop on Fary's Mill Road in Ark. The Driver Brothers were known throughout the region for their excellent skills at refinishing old furniture.
After Roger became very interested in designing and making fiberglass sailboats, the Gloucester Leg Stool Shop ceased to exist and is only a dim memory anymore.
Gloucester leg stool