Step right up onto the platform and into the crowd of candy-painted ponies. Jump on the rampant horse with wild eyes, hold on tight and soar with the calliope's unchained jangle through a dreamland safe inside a circle of delight.
The freedom and joy of the carousel ride is what carousel restorer and builder Todd Goings aims to preserve for generations to come.
“There’s nothing better than sitting behind a youngster on the carousel animal in front of you,” Goings said. “He’s laughing and giggling and just having a good time. That’s really an amazing feeling that’s really just hard to describe.”
For more than a quarter century, Goings, founder and president of Carousels and Carvings, in Marion, Ohio, has been keeping the joy of American carousels alive, one ride at a time. He and his staff have restored countless historic carousels and built new ones installed in public spaces around the country, all while sustaining the time-honored production methods of the hand-built American carousel tradition.
In recognition of that work, the National Endowment for the Arts named Goings a 2024 National Heritage Fellow, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts. In Goings’ case, it’s an honor that recognizes years of dedication to a career he stumbled into. Going’s career has taken him to the ranks of the master woodworkers, on a deep dive into American carousel history and coast to coast to help ensure that some of the nation’s most venerable hand-carved wooden dream machines can keep spinning well into the future.
A Magic Block of Wood
In the entryway of Carousels and Carvings, a welcoming delegation of painted horses from days of yore awaits, suspended mid-gallop and champing at the bit to canter back in time. Along a wall of the cavernous warehouse-style workspace beyond, rows of wooden horses on industrial shelves watch over a giant round carousel mechanism in the middle of the floor.
A carousel deconstructed, pieces waiting for a wizard to put them back together and make them magical again.
As a kid growing up in the tiny town of Caledonia, Ohio, Goings did a lot of pulling things apart and putting them back together. He’d hang around his grandfather’s workshop and watch his granddad tinker with wood and metal, nuts and bolts and other bits and bobs of the handyman’s trade.
Awash in the scent of sawdust and the thrilling sizzle of drills, Goings would tinker some himself.
“My grandpa would give me a board, a pile of nails and a hammer while he would do what he did, and I’d just pound nails in boards all day long,” Goings said. “I just loved it. It’s just something that I’ve never not done.”
When Goings wasn’t playing with boards in his grandfather’s shop, he’d drag home wooden pallets from the stacks behind a local warehouse, tear them apart and nail them together. During and after high school, Goings thought about how to make a living. He never considered doing anything other than working with wood, so he followed the age-old path of apprenticeship into the woodworking trade.
“There wasn’t – at least that I knew of – anyplace to go that was attainable to me, other than moving shop to shop,” Goings said. “To this day I really don’t have any formal education in woodworking or anything else. But I was fortunate enough to come right out of high school and have an interest that I already knew. It wasn’t like I was hunting for something to do. I was just hunting for someplace to do it.”
In 1986, Goings established a workshop in Marion as a cabinetmaker and furniture restorer. After “nearly starving to death,” as he put it, he found more lucrative work in an industrial pattern shop in Galion, Ohio. There, he expanded his woodworking skills, applying them to working with metals and plastics to make patterns for industrial use.
“I learned that metal and wood – it’s just the medium that we’re working in,” Goings said. “it’s nearly, in my mind, kind of the same process, whether I’m doing metal working or woodworking.”
In 1989, Goings read in the newspaper that The Carousel Works, then based in Mansfield, Ohio, was building the first hand-carved carousel in the U.S. since the 1930s. He reached out to The Carousel Works – which built the Richland Carousel in downtown Mansfield – and began working on that and other projects for the company, at first on a freelance basis. Goings had never considered making carousels as a career, but a few months later, the opportunity to work fulltime building carousels came along. Since then, he has directed his experience restoring furniture, building cabinets and making industrial patterns to building new carousels and bringing old ones back to life.
Goings worked for The Carousel Works until 1993 and, in 1997, founded his own firm, Carousels and Carvings. He and his team build and restore carousels with processes in use since the early 1900s, the Golden Age of the American carousel.
Those processes involve countless steps to create a combination of machine-made and hand-wrought parts. A master carver creates a full-size carousel horse pattern which is then used to machine duplicate an entire herd – often upwards of 50 horses – for a single carousel. Woodcarvers then carve details by hand into the horses, bringing out each animal’s personality through the shape and size of its eyes, the curls in its mane, the expression on its muzzle. Carvers also carve what Goings calls the “creatures and features,” decorations like saddles, belts and buckles, and secondary animals to accompany the horses. The carved animals are then painted in a spectrum of fantastical colors – blue horses with red reins and saddles, black horses with gilded tails, white horses with lemon-yellow saddle blankets and manes that shine like copper kettles.
All of this detail transforms the carousel into a real-life riot of filigree and fancy so fantastic that even Pegasus would do a double take.
“My view is to kind of catch the rider with something that you work hard to create and put personality in,” Goings said. “Nobody would ride a wooden block if it was riding around on a carousel. But if you can get the magic carved into that, get the eyes and the mouth and the ears and the mane and all that kind of stuff to be engaging, then they are very real in that moment.”
Real Time, Real Style
That moment of magic is born of months of exacting work. It can take one to two years, Goings says, to build or restore a carousel. In an average year, Goings can spend up to six months away from home restoring carousels on-site around the country. Among the historic carousels that Carousels and Carvings has restored are Jane’s Carousel, originally installed in Youngstown, Ohio, and now in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, the B&B Carousel at Coney Island, the Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel at Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum and the Grand Carousel at the Children’s Museum of Memphis.
The meticulous hand-detailing is intended to create or, for restorations, recreate a carousel’s original visual style, typically in one of three styles prevalent during the carousel’s Golden Age. Coney Island-style carousels, for instance, feature horses in flamboyant hues and poses so dynamic the animals seem on the verge of flight. The herds on Philadelphia-style carousels, by comparison, tend to be more subdued in color and posture and feature horse “tack” of more authentic design and color. Historic Country Fair-style carousels are known for their simply styled horses and their parts designed for comparatively easy transportation from one fairground to another.
“The best training for myself and the folks here at the shop is to do a restoration because there were no books on how to carve carousel horses that these folks left us,” Goings said. “So, by walking in the path of the restoration, we really get to see (the styles) and to carve missing parts and pieces on a Philadelphia-style carving or a Coney Island-style carving.”
If Warthogs Could Fly
In a rear workroom at Carousels and Carvings, Goings is chiseling and sanding a wooden form secured to a workbench. Short front legs curl forward from a rotund torso. A snout blunts out under brown glass eyes. A tusk curves from the wood on each side of the head.
“When we carve today, we don’t really carve as many horses, because a lot of our clients want all the other menagerie-style animals,” Goings said. “And maybe 50 years from now they’ll be naming a fourth style (of carousel) that has different-style animals on it. Why people come to us for what we do – we carve to put personality into the animals, and any animal is always open for discussion.”
As clients’ tastes in carousel style have changed, years of custom carousel restorations have enabled Goings and his team to adapt. The warthog Goings is creating is destined for the historic carousel at the Louisville Zoo, in Kentucky. Since restoring that carousel some years ago, Carousel and Carvings has added other animals to the ride’s menagerie. And once the warthog joins them, zoo visitors will be able to imagine what it might be like to fly through the air on one of the living warthogs at home in the habitat nearby.
Goings and his team also carve to make carousels accessible to riders of all abilities. All of their newly built carousels and, Goings says, all but two of the carousels they’ve restored include accessible components – for instance, a chariot updated to accommodate riders in wheelchairs. Here too, bespoke menageries, like the troop of monkeys Goings and his team carved into a wheelchair-accessible chariot on the carousel at the Staten Island Zoo, enable riders to experience an untamed fantasy world they won’t find anywhere else.
“It’s really, really rewarding to hear the stories of the parents who had children who were able to get their first carousel rides because these features are now available,” Goings said. “It’s really a whole new level of feeling and accomplishment.”
As he and his team adapt carousels to a range of tastes and needs, Goings is handing down the tradition of carousel building to a second generation. He has 15 people on staff at Carousels and Carvings, including his son, woodcarver Kyle C. Goings, and daughter-in-law, Vanneeda Keowmang-Goings, the company’s administrator.
“They’re the ones who turned the company into a family business,” Goings quipped.
But the joke has more than a literal ring of truth. The extensive family of historic American carousels that Goings and his company have rescued, revived or built over the last 27 years has the historical depth and richness of a Thoroughbred pedigree. And Carousels and Carvings remains on call to maintain most of the carousels the company has restored or built. Goings and his team are currently restoring the Smithsonian’s Carousel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It’s a 1947 Herschell carousel, and Goings knows those horses well – he’s worked on that carousel for most of his career. He’s spiffing up the animals now in preparation for the carousel’s return to the National Mall for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, in 2026.
Though Carousel and Carvings’ reputation has galloped far and wide, the company maintains close ties to home. And like a good carousel itself, Goings’ relationship with Mansfield’s Richland Carousel brings his own carousel career full circle. In 2016, he carved the carousel’s 25th-anniversary horse, which now rides alongside Going’s very first carousel carvings. His company continues to do the maintenance work on that carousel.
Not that young riders concern themselves with any of this. They’re too busy delighting in the fantasy of flashing lights and flying animals. That delight, that unbridled joy, is how Goings knows he’s done his job right.
“At a certain level, a carousel’s a carousel,” Goings said. “It makes folks happy, and it’s joyful for them to see it. And especially the little kids that ride it, they enter into that fantasy land and ride the carousel. That’s the end result, the end goal, and that’s kind of the feel-good at the end. They don’t worry about who did it. They just know that it’s there.”
