Restoring a Porter Saddle

[mbnaegle]

I'm still extremely early in this process, but wanted to start a thread for this project as it's technically already in motion. My Dad, Conrad "Connie" Naegle, was a saddle and harness maker and leatherworker for half his working life, before pivoting towards the machinery side of the industry where our family currently makes it's living. He had inherited several family heirloom saddles and had planned on restoring them eventually (of course life gets in the way). Half are currently in OK shape needing some basic work done, and the other half are far enough gone that they would need to be totally rebuilt. His health went downhill in later life (Alzheimer's and dementia) and he passed away in 2023. Being a working man his whole life, he didn't take well to having his body degrade, and his decline in memory and mental understanding of things we never really learned to cope with.

I grew up partway between his leather shop and his machine shop, though my carrier has been on the machine side of things. I worked with him a bit on the saddles, but often found myself having to hold him back from getting in too deep. In his mind he knew what to do, but somewhere between there and his senses things would get scrambled and he rarely recognized it. The saying "He's forgotten more about it that you'll ever know," comes to mind, but in a sad and discouraging way. His original plan was to restore all of the saddles to be ridable again and I think this intent was a way to put his skills to work righting the wrongs of himself and past family members who had let the saddles fall into disrepair (the saddles were all ridable in his lifetime), but we quickly found that doing so would remove a lot of their history and authenticity, especially in the oldest saddles, so we decided to preserve some (such as my Great Grandfathers 1880's saddle) as they were, and make others ridable.

This Porter saddle my Grandfather Buster Naegle got sometime in the 1930's in southeastern Arizona before he went off to school and then enlisted in the army during WW2. He went through boot camp down in Ft Bliss, but was transferred to Ft. Reno in Oklahoma where he trained horses and pack mules for the army. At some point after arriving there, there was some problems with their military saddles so with permission he had his family send him this Porter saddle to use and in some way it was a model of the kind of saddles they needed, and I think the guys in charge even ordered more from Porter to use at the fort (I'm hoping to eventually get in contact with someone at the fort to corroborate this, and I've already sent a message to the guys who have the old Porter card file website).

I remember in the mid 90's my dad did some minor repairs to this saddle and rode it around our place in northern Idaho. As a kid I didn't make the connection, but my Grandfather died around this same time and I'm certain this saddle was particularly special to my Dad. When we started digging into it, the hope was to soap it up, replace the sheepskin, and do some other minor repairs, but the more it came apart, the more the pieces crumbled and stitches ripped through the leather. In retrospect, I think it should have been preserved as a static display, but at this point I think the can of worms is open, and my choices are to replace 90% of the leather, or call it a loss (not really seeing that as an option). The original leather is heavily worn, which would have been nice to preserve, but I think the alternative is to reproduce the pieces as closely as possible. I'm going to need to reproduce the Porter makers mark somehow. I think hand tooling it will leave too much room for error, so I'm hoping I can have one made without getting in any copywrite hot water.

I had considered handing the project off to someone with more skill than mine, but I think these kind of projects always have a level of "artistic license" interpreting what details matter and which ones don't, and it's hard to turn that license over to someone else. Also, since my Dad was the family leatherworker and the saddle is a family heirloom, I think it best to keep the process in the family, even if it takes years to complete. My leatherworking skills have always been better on the technical process side, but I have a lot to learn of the craft and wisdom it takes to build a saddle. I'm starting by rebuilding some saddles that are less sentimental (thread about the first one *here*), but my end goal is to finish rebuilding this saddle (and others I'll post about later).

Fortunately, all the pieces are there and give good patterns to follow. Even the tooling I can already see how to replicate. Thankfully it's simple old-school boarders and nothing too artistic, which is how I like saddles personally.

Starting with the tree, I don't think I need to remove every bit of leather. I think the floor and other reinforcing pieces will continue to work. There are a couple of places that the wood under the rawhide has degraded, and I'm considering using some modern epoxy filler to fix those points (more on that later).

Part of the challenge I think is that I want the saddle to be 100% original, even though so much of it has to be replaced. I can make a new seat and skirts that look exactly like the old ones, but then getting them colored right and formed together right can be a challenge. I don't want to artificially wear or weather anything other than dying the leather to match, but I also don't want the new parts to stand out against the old. Like I said, I'm starting by practicing on some other saddles, but with this one I'm going to take my time.

One of my favorite mantras is to "Avoid permanent solutions to temporary problems." History deserves preservation, and I think keeping things functional as they were originally intended to be used is always the best approach.

Edited Tuesday at 02:08 AM by mbnaegle