Summer 2003, Old Bedford Village invited Carolyn Smith-Kizer to be the living history village's seamstress and dressmaker. The use of the church was offered, and Homer and Carolyn relocated farther east than Westerners commonly believe life is possible. Carolyn grew up in Idaho, and was there when Idaho State University in 1991 offered a Doctor of Arts fellowship to Homer, whose M.F.A. degree is from University of Alaska Fairbanks. He had been in Alaska since the Arab Oil Boycott of 1973 caused him to relocate his muzzleloading rifle shop from the Oregon Coast to Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. Old Bedford Mercers is the outgrowth of the long time craftsmanship of Homer and Carolyn.
While in Oregon Institute of Technology's gunsmithing program (1964-65), Homer was smitten by the handling qualities of the longrifle. He began building muzzleloading firearms fulltime in 1967, and was a journeyman gunmaker when the Oil Boycott financially hamstrung all businesses along Oregon's central coast. Although he went north with intentions of continuing to build rifles, he ended up with a chainsaw-outboard dealership, which he sold in 1979 to buy a boat and go commercial fishing; he migrated into the Aleutians on his outbound journey to where he could look into tomorrow. He returned to the mainland and to college in 1988, and while there, at the invitation of his students and the Native Arts instructor, he began carving using traditional Native American style adzes and crooked knives. His sculptural pieces have been displayed in various fine art galleries in Alaska since 1991.
Carolyn had a dressmaking business in Boise when she met Homer through a church newsletter. And as she became familiar with mountain men reenactors, she realized that her interests were in the fashions and lives of French Colonial women. She began to reenact as a French Colonial, and in 2000, she persuaded Homer to leave the West and relocate into Middle America. She pioneered the Belleville event at Old Bedford Village in 2002 and is the Listowner of yahoo.com's French & Indian Women's chatgroup.
The handcrafts that Homer and Carolyn offer to living historians through Old Bedford Mercers is a new business that is really the continuation of a three-plus decades old business. Only now, treenware and wood sculpture replace the carved riflestocks that came from a small shop tucked into the hills of Oregon's Lincoln County, a shop that had a river (the Siletz) across the road instead of Lake Huron down the hill beyond Port Austin's harbor.
Homer has Michigan connections: his mother was born near Brooklyn, and graduated from Jackson High School. Her father (his maternal grandfather) was a tool and die maker for Ford, and was born on a Vineyard Lake homestead when Rutherford B. Hayes was President. So his return from the edges of the continent to its middle is a coming home of sorts.
