About

I make things out of wood, almost entirely with hand tools. This is more than a hobby and not yet a profession. You can see my work (and buy some of it) at David Walbert Woodworking.

I also tell stories. One of these I have spun into a novel, which I like to think of (perhaps anachronistically) as “an adventure for all ages”: The Pirate Panther Princess, published in December 2022.

Recently I began hiking the North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail and writing about the experience on Substack at The Road to Jockey’s Ridge.

By training I’m a historian, a background that informs my woodworking (and pretty much everything else). I wrote a book called Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America and developed a digital textbook of North Carolina history based on primary sources; that was lost in budget cuts, but you can find it on the Wayback Machine. Before that I trained and briefly worked as a theoretical physicist (no joke). I am also an avid gardener and a curious baker, and I homeschooled my daughter in math, science, and the arts through 12th grade. I’ve done some teaching and a lot of writing, much of it archived at Walbert’s Compendium.

There’s more, but that will do for now.