The Most Beautiful Cornhole Set in America Was Made in Maine’s Maximum Security Prison
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There are two ways into the Maine State Prison, a maximum security facility in the tiny town of Warren. After passing a background check and getting the go-ahead from the prison commissioner, I go in the easy way. I leave my phone in the car and surrender my keys and identification to the guards behind the imposing desk and put my briefcase through an airport-grade metal detector.
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Once my belongings are cleared, I meet Ken Lindsey, avuncular in a tie and mustache.
Lindsey is the manager of the Prison Industries Program and he’s about to introduce me to the Maine penal system’s most talented residents. The new Maine State Prison looks nothing like the old Maine State Prison, which was built in 1824 and razed in 2002. Famously, it inspired the Stephen King novella-turned-TBS-mainstay The Shawshank Redemption. Lindsey, who cracks jokes with the guards as he leads me deeper into the facility, is clearly proud of the program he leads.
Resident labor is nothing new at Maine State Prison — inmates quarried granite as far back as the 1820s — but the current Prison Industries Program is something different. Lindsey sees it as a kind of refuge for the 110 residents who work in the program and make between $2 and $5 an hour — a rate that would be illegal anywhere outside of the penal system, but is far better than, say, the California prisoners who may make less than $3 per day fighting wildfires.
“Our goal is for the woodshop to be the high point of the residents’ day,” Lindsey says. “And if it’s not, I want to find out why and how to fix it.”
Lindsey takes me through a series of huge metal doors, calling to residents by name along the way. We enter the woodshop, which is orderly — furniture ready for finishing stacked neatly in the corner, workstations immaculate — and greet Michael Hutchinson.
Hutchinson, prisoner number 37792, is sturdy and quiet in a ball cap and casual clothes. He’s surrounded by the side and coffee tables he’s recently made, each with lovely inlay work, contrasting woods, and evidence not just of superior workmanship, but of careful design. On his workbench is a deft suspension table, its gravity-defying form held in place by cables in tension. He’s currently fashioning a Japanese kumiko tea box with a canny trompe l’oeil design that creates the illusion of 3D cubes. He says it could sell for as much as $1,000 at a gallery.
Hutchinson speaks with a strong Maine accent and when he talks about his woodworking practice he does so with focus and intensity. He spends five days a week (52 and a half hours) in the shop and, on Sundays, he spends an additional day learning from artisans and teachers who visit from the American Furniture Masters Institute (AFMI) in Concord, New Hampshire.
“Woodworking is my passion,” he tells me. “I started in high school with vocational classes and I’ve loved it ever since.” Though he worked as a mason in his father’s business before his incarceration, woodworking has always been his favorite.
“Once he started in the Prison Outreach program with AFMI,” says Lindsey, “you could see a light come on. He is constantly challenging himself with new projects.”
Seemingly eager to underscore Lindsey’s point, Hutchinson describes an oak trestle table he made for his sister where she and her children eat dinner every night.
But Hutchinson won’t ever sit at that table with his family. He entered the Maine State Prison in 2007 to serve a life sentence for the 1994 murder of Crystal Perry. A cold case for nearly a decade, the crime was only solved when DNA samples taken after Hutchinson was convicted for criminal threatening in 2003 matched blood and semen found in Perry’s house the night of the killing.
Hutchinson pleaded not guilty at his trial, claiming that he and Perry had been having consensual sex when a stranger burst into the room, knocked him out, and stabbed her to death. But the forensics told a different story. Hutchinson was given life.
Thomaston, Maine, population 2,800, is a charming, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New England town that Summer people — as the seasonal set is called — rarely stop in on their way up to Bar Harbor, unless they get caught at the one traffic light. Those who pull over for a coffee at Flipside or to check out the unexpectedly avant garde Interloc Gallery, all get the same suggestion: Don’t miss the Maine State Prison Showroom.
The Showroom, nestled next to an antique shop in a glass-and-brick storefront on Main Street, is where the kitschy acorn bird feeders, Maine-shaped cutting boards, and colorful wooden buoys produced in Ken Lindsey’s shop are sold alongside finer work: wooden bowls, Shaker-inspired furniture, and models of rigged tall ships. The Showroom pulls in roughly $1.5 million a year, which then funnels back into funding the program.
This summer, there’s something altogether different in the Showroom, an object whose obvious excellence of craft and design piqued my curiosity and sent me into the prison to meet Hutchinson in the first place. Sitting in the front window, with pride of place in the entire shop sits his latest masterwork: an arresting cornhole set that distracts shoppers from their erstwhile pursuit of souvenirs. It’s gorgeous, Danish-oiled, carefully constructed out of black walnut and curly maple. The joinery and expert spline work at the base is stunningly symmetrical. A custom wooden plaque explains that the set’s dimensions meet regulation standards. And between the two boards you’ll find a custom inlay bean bag box with bags in replica Louis Vuitton fabric. The price tag? $4,000. Too rich for most lawn game enthusiasts, but maybe not the old money driving to Winter Harbor.
There’s a small market for high-end cornhole sets and those made with less care and design than Hutchinson’s can fetch far higher prices. Matthias Kaupermann, the South Carolina furniture maker named for a once-famous Bavarian cabinetmaker, is the major player. The brand sells an inlaid maple wood model for $5,250 and weathered teak and dark walnut sets for $6,450. The Hamptons Cornhole Set, with a similar interlocking lattice base as Hutchinson’s design, sells for $6,450.
Showroom manager Philip Hodgdon reports that Hutchinson’s handiwork has gotten a lot of attention, as has the set’s price tag.
“A lot of people who check it out say, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful and wow, that’s expensive,’” He says. “Our goal is to keep it here for a while. It’s nice to showcase the ability that our guys possess.”
“The cornhole set took me around 200 hours,” Hutchinson tells me. “It’s probably in the top three projects I’ve ever done and I’ve done some pretty elaborate stuff, like a tambour dresser with a roll top that sold in a gallery for $8,500.”
Hutchinson got the idea for the cornhole set after a project converting trailers into mobile housing for homeless Maine veterans. There was leftover material from that job, and it got Hutchinson and his colleagues in the woodshop dreaming about all the possibilities.
“They donated the extra maple and walnut, which I got all rough cut,” he tells me. “I had to keep laying everything out and stand back and look at it to be sure that the woods and grains all matched. It was hard to do. Then, I know when I add the Danish oil to a product, it brings the grain out, so I have that in mind too. I had to think, ‘What’s it gonna look like when oiled? Will it match at that point, as well?’ The finished product came out pretty good.”
What sets Hutchinson’s work apart from everything else in the Showroom is that it’s so obviously a one-off, the marriage of technique and design that’s unmatched anywhere else in the shop. Though many of the Showroom’s products are nice, they feel more manufactured than crafted. Rarely does one see the hand, much less, the mind of the person behind it. And perhaps that’s by design. Maine State Prison Showroom’s goods don’t announce their makers.
Hutchinson’s talent is big enough that in any other situation, his name would be attached to his work. But that’s just not how the Showroom works. It’s hard, if not impossible — as noted by innumerable members of the commentariat — to separate the art from the artists; the Showroom separates crafts from the craftsmen.
But even without his signature, Hutchinson is present through the singularity of his work.
“The residents want to be a positive force,” Lindsey tells me. “They want to show the public what they are capable of…they also want to show their families the results of their hard work. They are proud of what they create.”
If the Prison Industries Program is the setting for Hutchinson, and for all the men in the program, to find purpose and community, expertise and respect, and in a small way reenter the world as their avatars — dressers, salad bowls, lobster-shaped cutting boards — so be it. Better still, brand their names in the wood.
“If someone buys the set for $4000,” says Lindsey, “they’re getting a tremendous deal.”
To get that deal, however, you need to come to Maine. State law prohibits the Maine State Prison Showroom from shipping goods across state lines. To purchase and cherish the work of the imprisoned, you must come to them.
Or, if $4000 is too steep, and you’re less interested in the men behind the work, there are other cornhole sets for sale in the Showroom. They’ve got paintings of lobsters and pine trees on them, and though they’re not particularly memorable, they’re nice and they’ll do the job.
The Showroom may well sell dozens of them before someone finally buys Hutchinson’s set. And the summer folk and tourists making those purchases likely won’t even think to ask who did the stenciling or the sawing. Those other cornhole sets don’t really even warrant the question. But one does.
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