Carving a bench with a friend

Hello and good morning all, today I'd like to share a project I needed to call in a friend to help me with last year.

The Casey's cottage bench...

Was a project for a historical site known as Casey's Cottage in Mexico Point Park in NY.
Some say its the most haunted site in NY. William Casey was the man it was named after. A Sociology professor at Columbia University who built the cottage with the help of his students and others. Not sure why it's haunted but I did get a spooky feeling when I walked in the place.
Here's a bit of writing on it.
https://hauntedhistorytrail.com/explore/caseys-cottage-at-mexico-point-state-park

The park managers hired me to carve a bench with William Casey reading a book.
We started out with a very large maple log.

Here is my friend and fellow carver Adam making some of the first cuts..
I had him cut the bench ends while I worked on William.

Here is William blocked out..

The wood was hard maple, some of the hardest I have carved..my hands hurt just thinking about it.
The project took us 2 and a half days...so glad I had decided to get help with this project.

By the end of the 2nd day we were just about done..

All we had left was a bit of burning and sanding as well as fitting the seat and backrest.

Here's Adam laying down on the job lol..no he's just cutting slots for the seat...

Here it is complete with us sitting like William...next up we had to break it down and deliver it to the cottage.

We did have a professional photographer there filming the whole process..
He put together this video for us.

I have best job in the world in my opinion.

I hope you enjoyed seeing what I saw, if so feel free to upvote and reblog. I love what I do and I'm happy to share.
Thank you all for looking and have a great day.
Jon