Jesse Aaron

1887 - 1985

Jesse Aaron was born in 1887 in Lake City, Florida as a descendant of slaves and a Seminole Indian grandmother.  He was an imaginative carver dedicated to finding form in wood. Before he completed first grade, his parents removed him from school and hired him out to do farm work for seven dollars a month. He served an apprenticeship as a baker and later operated bake shops.  In the early 1930’s, Aaron built a house for his wife and family in Gainesville, Florida where he would live for the remainder of his life.  In the late 1960s, he bought 3 acres east of Gainesville where he operated a nursery for the next several years.  In 1968, he was forced to sell the nursery to pay for a cataract operation for his wife, and for the first time in his life, at 81 years old, Aaron was unemployed.  According to Aaron, after he sold his nursery, “At 3:00 in the morning, July 5th, the Spirit woke me and said, ‘Carve wood.’  The Lord gave me this gift, and I just goes about trying to please him.”  He immediately began to carve, placing his finished pieces in his front yard.  He said “I can see faces on anything.  I can look at a tree stump, and I know just how it gonna look ‘fore I start.  It all depends on what God has put there in the wood.¹”