Wood tells story of way of life

By Susan Pugh

Published: November 4, 2008

When Sherry Stovall Flournoy was growing up, people looked forward to seeing the pumpkins carved by her father, David Hugh Stovall.

“His pumpkins had ears that stuck out, actual noses with nostrils and the funniest expressions,” she recalls.

The pumpkins foretold the future.

Years later when her father was 58, he began carving in wood. His carvings catalogued the way people who lived once upon a time in Amherst County, justas the paintings by his mother, Queena Stovall, did.

In fact, his work has been described as “Queena Stovall in 3-D.”

Flournoy — now a resident of Richmond — will bring some of the carvings of her father, who died in 2000, back to her native Lynchburg for a talk at 5 p.m. Nov. 12 at the Jones Memorial Library.

The people in her father’s carvings churn butter. The people in his carvings put down hams, the long and involved process of curing a country ham. The people in his carvings smoke cigarettes and roll dice on a Saturday night.

They are real people. There’s one of Annie Smith, for instance, who helped with curing hams.

The carvings show what things looked like. One is a nativity scene as Stovall envisioned it, had Jesus been born in a general store in “New Hope,” Va., in 1923 instead of in a manger in Bethlehem in the year 0.

The furnishings are copies of antiques in his house, such as a jelly cupboard. The paintings on the walls are copies of his mother’s.

Some of the characters in her son’s carvings came straight out of her paintings, such as a woman preparing a chicken for company coming to dinner.

Queena Stovall’s folk art has been included in a show called “Grandma Moses’ Southern Sisters: Queena Stovall and Clementine Hunter” and is part of the collection at the Fenimore House Museum in upstate New York. Her son’s carvings are owned by Flournoy, her brother David Jr. and her sister Judith Boland.

One of his carvings shows Sweetie Pie the hog wearing a chitterling necklace and corn corsage. Stovall made it for the chitterling dinners his mother hosted every year around Christmas.

He made a banner for the dinners, too. It shows a hog as though on a family crest, with the motto “ruspari porce aut peri.” Translation: “Root hog or die.”

The banner is in crewel embroidery.

He won a blue ribbon in the Rockingham County Fair for his crewel work. That got his picture in the newspaper, with a quote, “I really enjoyed stealing the prize from the ladies.”

Flournoy says her father took up embroidery when pro football player Rosie Greer did the same after being injured. “Daddy said, ‘If he can do it, I can do it.’”

Stovall, who stood 6-feet-1, had been Marine pilot who flew in the Pacific during World War II. He was awarded the Air Medal with eight stars and the Distinguished Flying Cross with two stars for heroism and meritorious achievement.

After the war, he went to work for Leggett department stores, opening stores in Harrisonburg, Staunton, Lexington, Charlottesville and Norfolk/Virginia Beach.

He was, by his own account, an exacting man, but a boss who swept the floor if it needed it. His daughter recalls him unlocking the store after closing on more than one Christmas Eve so people could get their presents — then wrapping them.

A newspaper in the Virginia Beach area where he retired quoted someone who called him “Mr. Retailer.”

Stovall was, in essence, a people person.

“If he had taken the Myers Briggs (personality test), he would have scored beyond the highest on extrovert,” Flournoy says. “I think 52 is the highest; he would have scored at least a 53.”

He made it a practice to speak to customers — so much so that one, who came in a little worse for the wear from imbibing the night before, told him that if he didn’t stop talking, she was going to go to a competitor’s store “where nobody speaks to you.”

During his 77 years, Lynchburg was always home. When his wife Barbara was expecting and was in California where he had been stationed, Stovall insisted that his first child be born in Lynchburg. His wife’s parents drove to California, got their daughter and drove her back so Flournoy could be born in Virginia Baptist Hospital.

if you’re going
WHAT: The John D. Owen Jr. Lynchburg History Lecture Series, ‘The Carvings of David H. Stovall’ by Sherry Stovall Flournoy
WHEN: 5 p.m. Nov. 12
WHERE: The Jones Memorial Library, 2311 Memorial Ave.
COST: Free
INFO: Visit http://www.jmlibrary.org or call (434) 846-0501