While he was growing up, Ben’s parents sawed lumber together at their custom sawmill Block Brothers Lumber in Monroe, Maine, where they cleared land and designed and built their home from the ground up. Sawing lumber offered them a way to work with their hands, to be self-sufficient, and to provide a useful, tangible service to people in their community. Ben had to leave Maine—and return home—to discover that this was what he wanted, too.

Ben studied ethnomusicology and education history and policy at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating he headed south to a small town outside of Durham, North Carolina, where he spent time on a horse farm and in an elementary school before finding work in a cabinet shop. Woodworking was a natural fit for a guy who had grown up with sawdust in his pockets. A stint at a small guitar shop helped him further hone his skills and deepened his appreciation for detail and quality. Eventually, Maine called him home. Ben started building cabinets and doing finish work for a builder in his hometown. In 2013, Ben founded his business, now housed in what was once a boatyard on Route One in Northport. Drawing on his deep familiarity with the materials and his love of the craft, Ben is exacting, and his work is still grounded in the same values he grew up with—craftsmanship, humility, and making something that will last.

These days, Ben lives with his wife Morgan and their two sons, Andrew and Henry, on a piece of old farmland not far from where he grew up. Morgan and Ben are raising the next generation of Block Brothers to have the hum of the shop woven into their days—close to the work and never far from the story that came before them.