Miles Burkholder Carpenter was born on May 12, 1889, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Wayne M. Carpenter, a farmer, and Elizabeth R. Burkholder Carpenter. He attended a one-room school and with his ten siblings worked on the Mennonite family’s farm. In the spring of 1902 the family moved to Virginia, where his father acquired a 340-acre farm near Waverly, in Sussex County, and also constructed a sawmill. On May 19, 1915, Carpenter married Mary Elizabeth Stahl, of Carbon County, Pennsylvania. They had one son. With financial assistance from his father Carpenter purchased a vacant factory in Waverly about 1912 and soon began operating a lumber mill that produced finished wood for local builders. He added his own sawmill to his enterprise and also began making and selling ice. For several years beginning about 1915 Carpenter joined a partner in operating an open-air theater showing silent movies. Occasionally tinkering with wood scraps, he made a violin and incised trinket boxes. During a slow period in his successful lumber business in 1941 he began whittling to pass the time. His first carving, a primitive polar bear, delighted his wife, who encouraged him to create more animals. The building boom following World War II (1939–1945) left Carpenter little opportunity for further woodcarving until several accidents suffered while operating machinery caused him to close his lumber mill in the mid-1950s.