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Serial #0222

Traveling Spirit Hall Table 

Wish I could have seen the travel trailer in its early days, either the green or silver phase. No doubt, it was homemade—thousands of screws holding a crazy quilt of tin, joints doped with thick aluminum trailer paint. Traveling in name only, the old trailer had to be dismantled in order to clean up and sell the property. But save the tin, Cleta declared, Doug can use it. So that is how I inherited a formidable stack of odd-colored tin. And now some of the greenest tin has become top panels for the Traveling Spirit Hall Table.

The spirit part comes from the haunted Jones house in Higgins, Texas. No ghosts were in evidence during the salvage work. Back in the late ‘30’s, though, Mrs. Jones was so convinced that the house was haunted she moved out. Then she had Mr. Jones build a new house next door. The back door of the haunted house yielded just enough lumber to frame out the tin panels. Pink on the drawer box comes from a room in the house where newspaper padding under the old linoleum dates from 1938. The drawer box is lashed to the table with two bales worth of baling wire. A wagon endgate wingnut serves as the drawer pull.