DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — History will truly come to life during Florida’s Chautauqua Assembly this weekend, thanks to the hard work of three high school students.
Two identical wooden lecterns, made to mirror the one that former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn stood behind in 1976 after Carter won his bid for the White House, will be used during the opening events of the four-day festival.
Check out a slideshow of the lectern. >>
The first one will be revealed Friday morning as the former first lady addresses an expected crowd of more than 800 people at Walton High School.
She’ll stand behind thea second one during an afternoon speech at a tree-planting ceremony in honor of her husband. One of them also will be presented to her as a gift at the end of the day.
“I’m very touched that these industrious students were inspired to build a lectern for my visit,” Carter said in an emailed statement to the Daily News. “It will bring back so many memories of a very special time.”
Celby Leach, Tristan Merchant and Dylan Shaw were assigned to the project after Christopher Mitchell, who oversees the assembly, contacted their instructor at Walton Career Development Center to ask if they could make the lecterns.
Students in the construction program frequently make items for the public, but teacher Thomas Martin said he initially was hesitant to take on the task. He eventually decided to accept Mitchell’s proposal and knew Celby, Tristan and Dylan were the perfect students to tackle the job.
“Each one of them takes the initiative,” Martin said. “I felt they could finish the project.”
All three agreed to the assignment and made a trip to the Carters’ hometown of Plains, Ga., to see the actual lectern, which is displayed in a local museum.
“At first we thought it was going to be really easy,” Dylan said. “(But) there was a lot of learning. We didn’t have a lot of pictures or measurements to go by.”
Suddenly it became not only a lesson in woodworking, but one of history and patience.
“We just looked at the different kinds of wood and we just figured out the dimensions by the type of wood used,” Tristan said. “I was so scared we were going to get it all wrong.”
In addition to studying the wood, the teenagers, who also attend Walton High School, used the former president’s height to figure out how tall to make the frames.
After figuring out the dimensions the best they could, they turned their attention to the necessary supplies. It took several days at the hardware store and a lot of thought, but eventually they settled on white pine for the tops of the lecterns and yellow pine for the bases.
Tristan said they initially planned to make both lecterns simultaneously, but quickly abandoned the idea as the difficulty of the assignment sunk in.
It took three months to finish the first one. It took one day to build the second and less than a week to add all the finishing touches.
“The trim and the molding is what we really kept goofing up on,” Celby said.
By Wednesday afternoon, one of the lecterns was complete and the students were staining the second one.
“You can’t mess up much here,” Celby said with a smile as he recalled all the blood and sweat needed to make them.
Rather than refute Celby, Tristan, who was using a paintbrush to stain the second lectern, reached up his free hand and knocked on the top it.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Katie Tammen at 850-315-4440 or ktammen@nwfdailynews.com. Follow her on Twitter @KatieTnwfdn.