Earl Hopkins was only 8 when he began “whittling,” sitting beside his grandmother Johnnie Mae Phillips, “who helped me,” he recalls. The first thing he made was a 12-inch pine figure of a Minute Man, copied from the likeness on his mother’s insurance policy.

“Then, I took a penny and carved Abraham Lincoln from it,” says the Associate Curator of Old Depot Museum. “Next was George Washington, from his face on a dollar bill. Those were my heroes.”

His granddaddy also “whittled” and did leather work, but Hopkins preferred wood – and still does. “You can carve wood into a three-dimensional figure.” His carving on display at the museum bear witness to that.

As a boy, he says, he was fascinated with the crocheted birds his grandmother made, “using lots of colors, stiffening them with starch and shaping them. I haven’t stopped making things since those days.”

His carvings come from his own ideas, he says. “I don’t want my work to look like that of anybody else.” But he admits to a preference for elephants. “I studied the life of Shaka Zulu, King of the Zulus, when I was a student at Old Knox Academy. The Zulus were warriors, couldn’t be enslaved, and Shaka Zulu liked elephants like I do.”

As a boy and a young man, Hopkins says he spent his money on tools, paints and wood. “I remember making carved flower pots for my mother, painting them the prettiest colors – but I came home one time and found them thrown away in the corner of the lot.

“That still hurts me.”

Hopkins still works with leather to some extent, but finds the cost of the material very expensive. His first piece of leather, he says, cost $9.95. Today that same piece would be $225.

In Williamsburg, where he worked for 43 years, Hopkins worked a good bit with leather as well as wood. He showed his work frequently in Virginia and in Washington, D.C. at the Mall, where the minority festivals were held. From time to time, visitors at the museum recognize Hopkins from his years at Williamsburg.

Today, fish is his favorite subject to carve, “maybe because I am a Pisces, born March 6. One of the prettiest pieces I ever made was a tropical fish, a fancy-tail Guppie that I painted in brilliant colors.”

Today, much of Hopkins’ work is limited by his customers’ preference: tables with elephants’ heads carved on the legs, ducks and swans for display and, of course, graceful fish. His work may be seen at Riverfront Market and at the museum.