The temptation in a small town is to imagine that all the finer things in life come from the big city.
But Bison Woodworking, which for the last year has been turning out some of the most elegant hardwood furniture you’re likely to clap eyes on, is a spirited rebuke to that notion.
In just over a year, the Humboldt-based company has won clients in places as far-flung as Hawaii, California, Montana, plus a dozen other scenic reaches. And the company’s appeal is only growing.
A subsidiary of B&W Trailer Hitches, Bison Woodworking was the brainchild of Humboldt-native Craig Newman, who, in 2006, still enmeshed in his career as a local mail carrier, began using his spare time to craft old-fashioned butcher blocks in his garage. Newman had been a part-time woodworker most of his life, but his craftsmanship was entering a new phase. After years perfecting the small-scale manufacture of cutting boards, he shifted his focus to the more ambitious, kitchen-island-style butcher blocks.
The product was a hit. Newman set up a website and found himself soon in the habit of delivering 30-plus pieces a year.
In 2015, Newman, just a year shy of retiring from the postal service, took the idea for Bison Woodworking to B&W owner Joe Works.
Works, who has a strong record of improving the fates of a number of area entrepreneurs — and who, with the recent acquisition of much of the downtown square, seems poised to lead Humboldt itself up that same golden road — liked Newman’s idea and agreed to set the craftsman up in a shop of his own and to shelter his endeavor under the B&W name.
In another fillip of good fortune, it was around this time that Newman met Dirk.
DIRK SORENSON is the design half of Bison Woodworking. If you were to devise in a lab the ideal partner for Newman and for Bison, you couldn’t arrive at a specimen more suited to his job than Sorenson. Equal parts artist and engineer, the 33-year-old Yates Center-native and Pitt State grad is responsible for the metal fabrication end of Bison’s furniture-making startup.
From an early age, Sorenson seemed primed to become an artist. The beneficiary of a number of national arts awards in high school — one of which came on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York — Sorenson took his talents to the art department at Emporia State University. His strengths during those years were many: drawing, metal sculpture, pottery. But Sorenson realized early on that the arts crowd wasn’t for him. “The whole culture around the arts,” remembered Sorenson, “I just didn’t like it. I was kind of a hometown kid, you know.”
At the end of that school year, Sorenson took a summer job in the engineering department at B&W. He had done some drafting in high school and was encouraged to do similar technical drawing while at B&W. He loved it.
Encouraged by his success, Sorenson transferred his credits to Pittsburg State University’s engineering department, where he “ended up hybriding the two, art and engineering, together.”
“I just saw a brighter future in engineering than I did in art,” reasoned Sorenson, “and I see the metal fabrication and the stuff we do here at Bison as a kind of outlet for my art.”
According to Newman, some three-quarters of the shop’s products — dining and conference tables, patio carts, kitchen islands, butcher blocks and more — combine the use of domestic hardwood and high-grade steel, which makes B&W’s metal-molding facilities a significant asset.
“That’s the thing that sets us apart from all the other shops,” said Sorenson. “Because of B&W, we have the capabilities and all the technology to make a high-end product and to do lots of things out of steel that most other places can’t.”
