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What keeps the customers coming back from as far away as Buffalo, though, is not just the selection: because Harper and his family make all their concrete statuary right on the premises, the prices are low. The pig, for example, is just $34, and a 10-in.-high rabbit is $3.50; it might sell for three times as much in a typical garden store. Brightly painted versions (too brightly, some might say) cost about 20% more. Says Harper: "I guess we sell about half our concrete painted and half not."
But it is too cold to stand outside talking; the temperature is down in the 30s, and the sky is clouding up. Besides, there are few buyers at this time of year, and the boys are inside working to replenish the stock for the consumer onslaught that will begin around Mother's Day and last all summer. "We pour six days a week, year round," says Harper, as he leads the way into the shed, a dirt-floored, corrugated-metal building about 30 ft. wide and twice as long. The shed is filled with the paraphernalia of the concrete game. One 60-ft. wall is hidden by floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with empty molds and piles of rabbits, frogs and other small animals. In front of the shelves sit three long work tables cluttered with cans of oil, reinforcing rods and clamps.
The rest of the building is devoted to larger projects: one of the big-deer molds, clamped together and full of concrete that was poured the day before, is propped up on a homemade wooden frame. Several other drying molds, including a planter with a fox peering over the edge and a large turkey, stand on their own. Moving among them, Doug is methodically assembling and preparing two different kinds of molds for today's pouring. The aluminum variety comes in sections, which he clamps together and paints inside with used motor oil, so the concrete won't stick. The other molds, made of rubber, come in a single sheet that nestles into a fiber-glass form. "Aluminum molds are the best," says Harper, "because they last forever. But even though rubber wears out after a few years, you need it for anything with a lot of fine detail, so you can peel the mold away a little at a time." While Doug gets the molds ready, Dale and Russell are preparing concrete at the far end of the room. "I'd say we do 150 items a day," says Harper. "What we really need is a building four times this size. Then we could do more pouring in winter and build up the stock."
If the assembly line works smoothly, that is no surprise. Harper and his wife Betty started the business some 25 years ago. "At the time," he says, "I was working at the local Safeway supermarket, but I thought it might be nice to get into my own business." He was looking through a garden magazine one day when he saw an ad for a concrete-mold catalog. "I got it, even though they wanted $3 for it," says Harper, and sent away for a concrete-planter mold. He and Betty started in the backyard. In winters they poured in the basement.