She Sold Out Every Fall for 35 Years. Now Illinois Sculptor Arlene Whitlock (68) Is Quitting – and the Reason Why Surprised Everyone. Her Final 600 Hand-Painted Scarecrows Go at a Farewell Price

She sculpted the original in clay for her father’s 60th birthday. For 35 falls she has cast it and painted every single one by hand in his old dairy barn outside Galena. This is the last run – and when it’s gone, there is no next October.

Galena, Illinois. The barn still smells a little like hay, even after thirty-some years of acrylic paint and cold coffee. A space heater ticks in the corner. On the long table under the loft window stand fourteen scarecrows in a row – hats on, arms out, faces still blank, waiting.

Arlie Whitlock pulls one toward her, dips a brush the width of an eyelash into burnt orange and adds a single stitch to a patch on the overalls. Then another. Then she leans back and squints at it.

“Nobody’s ever going to see that stitch,” she says. “But they’d notice if it wasn’t there. They just wouldn’t know why.”

She is 68. She has been painting this face since George H. W. Bush was in the White House.

“Everybody buys the cheap one once”

Ask Arlie why anyone should pay real money for a Halloween scarecrow when the big-box store out on Highway 20 sells a light-up one for twelve dollars, and she doesn’t argue. She just nods.

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” she says. “It looks fine in the box. Then the paint’s one flat color, the face is printed on crooked, and by the second fall the light’s flickering and the arm’s glued back on. So you buy another one. I’ve had women at my booth tell me they went through six before they found me.”

Hers starts somewhere else entirely: with an original she sculpted by hand, in clay. Every piece is cast from that one original, then painted by hand – the patches on the shirt, the stitching on the overalls, every single straw at the wrists and ankles, the grain in the old post, the feathers on the crow. Close to three hours a piece, at a table that used to hold milk cans.

And then there’s the head. The jack-o’-lantern glows from the inside – a warm, low, candle-colored light that comes through the carved eyes and grin and spills down over the shoulders.

“People send me pictures every fall,” she says. “Never in daylight. Always at night, with the lights off. That’s when it looks like it’s supposed to.”

A birthday present, and a crow named Pete

Arlie grew up on this farm. Every September her father, Walt, stuffed an old pair of overalls with straw, carved a pumpkin for the head, jammed an old pointed black felt hat on top and set the whole thing up on a post at the edge of the corn.

It never scared off a single bird. One crow in particular – the family called him Pete – sat on one of its outstretched arms every fall for the better part of ten years.

“Dad would stand at the kitchen window and yell at Pete,” she says, laughing. “Pete didn’t care. Pete was family.”

In 1989, trained in sculpture but working as an art teacher, Arlie modeled a small version of her father’s scarecrow in clay for his 60th birthday – crooked hat, patched overalls, Pete on the arm. Walt put it in the front window and showed it to anyone who came up the drive.

Then the neighbors wanted one. Then their sisters. In 1992 she cast her first small batch, painted them one by one, and took them to a fall craft fair in Dubuque. She sold out by noon. For the next three decades, every autumn meant farmers markets and harvest festivals from Galena to Madison – and a barn full of scarecrows waiting for their faces.

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“Five years she asked. Five years I said maybe.”

This is where you’d expect a story about bad hands or a bad back. Arlie cuts that off before the question is finished.

“My hands are fine,” she says. “My eyes are fine. That’s not it.”

Her granddaughter, Tilly, is nine. Every year Galena’s Main Street fills up with kids in costumes for the Halloween parade – and every year since Tilly was four, she has called her grandmother at the beginning of October with the same question: Grandma, are you coming to the parade this year?

“And every year I said ‘maybe,’” Arlie says. “Which meant no. October is my whole year. I’m out here until midnight painting faces and packing boxes. Five years of maybe.”

She sets the brush down.

“This September she didn’t call. I asked my daughter about it, and she said Tilly told her, ‘Grandma’s busy with the scarecrows.’ Nine years old and she’d already stopped expecting me.” A pause. “That’s not a sad story. That’s a grandmother with her priorities in the wrong order. And I’m fixing it.”

Couldn’t someone take it over? She shakes her head.

“I’ve taught two people. Both talented. Both could paint the overalls in a week. Neither of them could do the face – and the face is the whole thing. I’m not putting my father’s scarecrow out there with somebody else’s smile on it.”

So instead of selling a few at a time at markets until they were gone, she made a different decision. Backroad Goods – a small shop that carries work from makers in rural America – took the entire final run of 600 scarecrows, at a farewell price, so they end up on porches and mantels this October instead of in a barn.

“I’m not trying to squeeze the last dollar out of it,” she says. “I’d rather six hundred families have one this Halloween than have them stacked in here while I’m standing on Main Street watching a nine-year-old dressed as a bumblebee.”

What her customers say

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The gift that comes out of the box every fall

A good share of Arlie’s orders every year aren’t for the buyer at all.

“Daughters buying for their mothers, mostly,” she says. “Or somebody who just moved into their first house and wants one thing for the porch that didn’t come off a pallet. And grandmas who want something on the step when the kids come up the walk.”

She knows that after this year, the scarecrows will become something else. “They’ll be around a long time,” she says. “Somebody’s going to pull one out of a box in the attic in thirty years, plug it in, and wonder who painted it.” She picks the brush back up. “Good. Let them wonder.”

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Put it on your mantel or your porch step. Plug it in when the sun goes down. Look at the patches, the straw, the little crow, the way the pumpkin glows. If it isn’t what you hoped for, send it back within 30 days and get your money back. No arguments, no restocking fee.

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