Christopher Sean Polk

Age: 24
Occupation: Craftsman and Yard Manager, Circa 1857
Hometown: Baton Rouge

Chris Polk pauses before a barn door that looks as if it could have been put together when Pennsylvania Dutch turned over our city’s wet river silt.

The wood is thirsty now, its whorls and grooves raw from every sliding entry, every violent gust, every dank summer evening. The dust of its tired joints has metastasized.

Under the patient gaze of Polk, the young craftsman of the Circa 1857 yard, it will be reborn.

Polk looks at it and sees a table.

People will circle it. Delicious scents and heavy meats will adorn this plank, this witness to travelers and rude weather.

“A door, to me, is the most useful tool,” Polk says. “It can be used as backing, as the top of a piece, walls, partitions.”

The best are blessed to be tables.

Polk pulls the soul from the grain using a variety of different techniques, tools and lacquers.

Old pieces made new again have a way of comforting people, he says. Nobody tiptoes around them. They fill a space with life.

Polk started his repurposing career with the café benches inside Circa 1857. Always a perfectionist, he winces now when he sees them. “You can see the streaks,” he says.

His hands were soft, then, except for the ridges on his fingers from playing the electric bass.

But not anymore.

Now, fully cracked and calloused, they seem to have taken on the character of the tossed-out bits and pieces of old homes, barns and stores he makes into gleaming and finely sanded treasures.

Polk graduated from Tara High School in 2006 and fell in love with this work soon after, about the time he was trying to decide what to do with his life.

Looking around in the rain at half-rusted antique bathtubs that might again cradle children, or their exhausted parents, he can’t imagine working anywhere else.

“There’s something about this place that sparks creativity,” he says. “This place is breathing art.”