photography by J. Sinclair

“Front page. Center section. Above the fold. It doesn’t get any better than that,” said the voice on the other end of the line. Jim Leonard hung up the phone and grinned at his dot-matrix portrait on the Wall Street Journal ’s cover.

Serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Textiles and Apparel under President Bush, Leonard was accustomed to giving interviews. In his government post, Leonard led the efforts in negotiating international trade agreements with a special focus on textiles.

But despite the “high level of intensity” of the job and the endless trips to China, it was the expectant birth of his grandson that finally encouraged Leonard to return to civilian life, family, and home.

Back in Jamestown, the natural look of redwood siding and detailed woodwork set Leonard and wife CeCe’s home apart from its neighbors. The couple’s New England salt box is based on characteristics of homes in Historic Deerfield. The front door, for example, was copied from the Parson Ashley House by Clyde Meyerhoeffer, a German woodworker from the Shenandoah Valley.

Meyerhoeffer had the Leonards carve the matching rosettes above the finial in the broken pediment as a way of personalizing the entrance. Just below the couple’s handiwork, hand-blown panes of bull’s-eye glass from London make up the overlight above the front door.

Carving the rosette for the front door was hardly a stretch for a man known as the “flying whittler.” Leonard began carving animals, two-by-two, on those long trips to China as a way of passing the time and filling the orders for his Noah’s Arks — once for sale at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

So while his wife tended to gravitate to antique textiles like quilts and coverlets, Leonard pursued the woodcarvings of American folk artists like J. Ludwig and Wilhelm Schimmel.

Leonard’s affinity for woodcarvings was matched, if not surpassed, only by his love of 18th-century American wrought iron. A collector of antique iron for almost 40 years, and someone who has also practiced the art of blacksmithing, Leonard was well-known in collecting circles as an aficionado in the field.

So when the stage manager with the film The Patriot called him regarding the use of 18th-century camp pieces in a swamp scene, Leonard packed up a collection of hooks, chains, trivets, and sawtooth trammels he thought would work and shipped them Air Express. “They ended up buying and using it all in the movie,” Leonard says, still in disbelief. What’s left in his collection is nothing short of breathless if you appreciate the artistry of genuine hand-wrought iron.

That appreciation for history and a connoisseur’s eye for craftsmanship is present throughout the Leonards’ home and property — whether in the canted brickwork of the den fireplace copied from the Dwight Barnard House in Deerfield, the reconstructed log cabin that sits behind the house with its dry-stacked stone chimney, or the cabin’s paneled chimney salvaged from a revolutionary general’s house in Connecticut. Together, it is all like an American anthem.

A beehive thumb latch, rose-head nails, hand-blown glass, reclaimed heart pine — all the result of a lifetime of collecting — show up in the home’s smallest details. “Everything has a story,” Leonard says with a smile.

Two days after Leonard returned home from four and a half years with the Bush administration, James C. Leonard V was born. Today, when young “King” James visits his grandparents’ house, he exclaims, “big clock, big clock.” With hands outstretched, Leonard lifts his grandson up to the eight-day brasswork clock as the little one whispers “tick tock, tick tock.”

“He’s fascinated with watching the second hand go round and the pendulum swing,” Leonard says.

In a house where it seems time has stood still, the New England sea captain’s clock seems the perfect metaphor for time spent with family.