THE SQUARE MILE COLLECTION – a Conway, Arkansas leather collection, Volume II
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies.
An August study.
For Conway, Arkansas. Volume I of these studies belonged to the tiny toads; Volume II goes back to how the town got here. We call it the Square Mile Collection.
First, we wrote the town a ticket. Conway began in 1871 as Conway Station, so we set the name in old railway ticket type and punched the hole in the stub – then ran it lengthwise along the luggage tags, the way a ticket rides in a pocket.
The black tag carries the ticket in gold foil; the warm tan and navy tags take a blind deboss.
Next, the plat. The engineer who brought the rail line through was paid one square mile of Arkansas ground, and the whole town was drawn inside it. We drew the square back, with its survey ticks and its north arrow, and pressed ONE SQUARE MILE onto keychains in golden tan and deep green.
It looks genuinely beautiful.
Then, the confluence. Five miles west, Cadron Creek meets the Arkansas River, and settlement in this valley began at that meeting. We let the two waters merge into a single line and set CADRON beneath – stamped in the corner of a navy and chestnut dopp kit stack, river water over creek bed.
Then, a page from a field notebook. In 1820 the naturalist Thomas Nuttall sketched the Cadron blockhouse in his journal, and the one standing at the settlement park today was rebuilt from that drawing. We redrew it in field-sketch line for the leather journals, in warm tan and deep green – so a drawing that started in a notebook comes back to one.
Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather.
And finally, the end of the line. A catchall tray is where keys and coins finish their run each evening, so we ended a rail line in it – two rails narrowing to a buffer stop under LAST STOP, pressed deep into the golden tan tray.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're in Conway and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.
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