2 days ago | Advertorial | Nora Whitcomb

“After 38 years, I can’t see the whole thing anymore. These are the last ones I’ll ever build.” — Hattie (66) is selling her final candle carousels at a special price.

For 38 years, Harriet Bowen kept the weathervanes and steeple ornaments of Maine turning. Now the 66-year-old is closing her workshop in Bath — and letting go of the one thing she ever built for the inside of a house: a small brass carousel that turns on nothing but the heat of a candle. When these are gone, nobody is making more.

Harriet “Hattie” Bowen (66) in her workshop in Bath, Maine. After 38 years, she is closing her life’s work.

Bath, September. The workshop sits on the second floor of an old ship chandlery on Front Street. It smells of flux and cold metal. Along one wall hang sheets of brass and copper, sorted by gauge. On the bench lies a half-finished rotor, its blades still flat. Hattie Bowen works the way she has since 1988. But this autumn is her last.

“It’s my eyes,” she says, and taps the frame of her glasses. “Glaucoma. It doesn’t take the middle, it takes the edges — you keep the thing you’re looking straight at and lose everything around it. Which sounds survivable until your whole trade is balance. I can still see one blade. I can’t see whether all six of them agree with each other.”

Then she adds what seems to bother her more. “And the trade went with it. Half the steeples in this state have a molded plastic vane on them now. From the street you’d never know. Go up there in a storm and it doesn’t move. Nobody complains, because nobody looks up anymore.”

38 years, 91 steeples — a life spent balancing things nobody could reach

North light never moves. After 38 years it is still the only light Hattie will judge an angle by.

Hattie has counted. In 38 years she has rebuilt or rehung the vanes and spire ornaments of 91 churches across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. A copper rooster in Wiscasset that had seized solid in 1974. A banner vane in Rockland that pointed north in every wind there was.

“People think a weathervane is a decoration,” she says. “It isn’t. It’s a machine with one moving part, and that part has to work in a breath of air after forty winters. Get the bearing wrong or the weight wrong and you’ve built a very expensive ornament.”

In 2000 her granddaughter Tess was five years old and frightened of the dark in October. Hattie went up to the shop, took a length of brass and a candle cup, and built her the first carousel — the same bearing she used on the steeples, only turning on rising warm air instead of wind.

“If a thing is turning, a child watches the thing,” she says. “She stopped watching the corners of the room.”

A neighbor saw it in the window and wanted one. Then the Bath harvest fair asked. She has built them every autumn since — twenty-six Octobers.

What makes Hattie’s carousels different

It isn’t the cut-outs. Anybody can cut a witch out of sheet brass. What decides whether one of these is still turning in twenty-five years or stops for good in its second October is the part nobody photographs: the pivot.

Lit at dusk, the shadows do the work — the whole wall starts moving with it.

The pivot build: the rotor sits on a polished steel point resting in a shallow bearing cup — the same arrangement Hattie used on church vanes, scaled down. Friction that low means one tealight is enough: the carousel picks up and starts turning in under forty seconds. Each of the six blades is set by hand to twenty-two degrees. Flatter and the warm air slips past without taking hold; steeper and it stalls against itself. The four hanging figures are matched to within half a gram of each other, because an unbalanced rotor wobbles, and a wobbling rotor drags on its own point until it stops.

Every rotor is set and balanced on the bench, one at a time, before it is ever lit.

“A true pivot is the entire thing. I have opened up a lot of these spinners and the ones that fail all fail the same way — the metal rides on a wire instead of a point, the hole goes oval, and it seizes. Get the bearing right and it will turn for thirty years on nothing but a candle.”

Warren Diggs, weathervane conservator, 28 years, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

“Some of my customers have lit theirs every October for twenty-five years”

Letters from customers, some going back nearly twenty-five years. Hattie has kept every one.

“People write back,” she says. “Usually in October, when they get it out again.” She pulls one out, dated 2021: “Dear Mrs. Bowen, it has been on our table every Halloween for nineteen years now. Our son is grown and living in Denver and he still asks whether it goes round. It does.”

The reason they last is patience instead of speed. A factory stamps out thousands a day, all identical, none of them balanced. Hattie builds one at a time, and a single carousel takes her the better part of a day — from the first cut to the moment she lights it and watches a full minute to be sure it doesn’t drift.

Under the bench she keeps a crate of carousels people have brought her hoping she could save them. Not one of them can be fixed. “There’s nothing in there to repair,” she says. “They punched a hole in the tin and dropped it over a wire. That isn’t a bearing, that’s a hole. Once it goes oval, it’s done. You can’t put a bearing into something that was never built for one.”

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The end of an era — and one last chance

The last batch: 312 carousels, all built in the eighteen months since her diagnosis.

At the end of October, Hattie closes the workshop for good. “There’s nobody to hand it to,” she says. “Nobody wants to spend years learning a trade like this. And I couldn’t teach it now anyway — you can’t show somebody balance you can’t see yourself.”

On the shelves there are still 312 carousels. Every one of them built in the eighteen months since her diagnosis, in the hours her eyes still gave her. It is the last batch that will ever pass through her hands.

“I have spent my whole life putting turning things on top of buildings where nobody can reach them. These ones I want on kitchen tables, where somebody can sit and watch.”

— Hattie Bowen, Bath, Maine

So that they find homes before Halloween, she has done something she never did at the fairs: set one clear price on every single one. At the Maine craft fairs her carousels sold for $69. For this last batch, they are $39. “I never charged for my time on these anyway,” she says. “A day’s work at what I used to bill an hour would have priced them off the table. They were never the business. They were the part I liked.”

“My granddaughter Tess handles the online side,” she adds, laughing. “I can rehang a two-hundred-pound vane in a gale. Don’t ask me to work a website.”

It was Tess — the same girl the very first carousel was built for — who photographed every one of them and put the little shop together over a weekend. “She said the first one was hers, so the last ones should be her job too. I couldn’t argue with that.”

What sets Hattie’s carousels apart

One candle is the whole of it. No switch, no cable, nothing to charge.

• Built one at a time: every carousel is cut, set, balanced and tested by Hattie herself. No production line, no batch that goes out unlit.
• A real pivot bearing: a polished steel point in a bearing cup — the same arrangement she used on church vanes, not a punched hole on a wire.
• Six blades at twenty-two degrees: each one set by hand. That angle is what makes one small flame enough.
• No motor, no batteries, no cable: it runs on rising warm air. Nothing in it can wear out or go flat.
• Speckled mercury-glass cup: it throws light back up through the figures, so the shadows carry right across the wall.
• Turns in under forty seconds: light the candle, sit down, and it picks up on its own.
• 312 built, and no more coming: the entire final batch. When they are gone, there is nobody making them.

What real customers say about Hattie’s carousels

Photos sent in by customers from last October.

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“A gift for the people you actually care about”

What makes one of Hattie’s carousels such a good gift isn’t only the work in it. It’s that it does something. “You’re not giving somebody an object that sits there,” she says. “You’re giving them ten minutes at the end of a dark evening where the whole room moves. A small light for the dark half of the year — and something that won’t be made again.”

Her customer Nicole B. (41) from Brunswick agrees: “I gave one to my sister and told her a woman in Maine had balanced every piece of it by hand, and that she’s going blind and these are the last ones. She lit it that night and sent me a video of her whole kitchen wall moving. I ordered a second one for myself two days later.”

Where can you buy Hattie’s carousels?

They are available exclusively through this page. Tess runs Hattie’s small shop at Back Road Goods, and it is the only place you will get an original out of the Bath workshop.

Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar sites, cheap look-alikes have started showing up. In a photograph they look almost the same. In your hand they are thin stamped metal with a punched hole hanging on a wire — light one and watch how long it keeps turning.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the carousel isn’t right for your home, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is all it takes to get your money back.