It’s a strange thing that woodworking is considered a solitary endeavor today, because craft throughout history was a community practice. Whether it was hewing timbers for the Johnsons’ new barn, harvesting hay before the clouds roll in, or quilting at the bee, people of the past knew that work was more enjoyable and turned out better when done together. Neither modernist individualism nor Taylorist reductionism has changed this fact. Get together with your friends. Embrace craft as a social activity. I’ve long been intrigued by the fact that much manual labor throughout history has been carried along by hearty communal singing. Author Richard Henry Dana wrote in his 1841 memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, “A song is as necessary...
Windsor chairs were designed by turners, for turners. Spring-pole, treadle, and great-wheel lathes were all common in early 19th-century America, along with a few water-driven mills and lathes powered by horses, oxen, and even dogs. Of the human-powered options, great-wheel lathes had power, speed, and continuous rotation, but the apprentice turning the wheel was an expensive power source – these lathes were best reserved for large-diameter turnings. Treadle lathes had speed and continuous rotation, but lacked power until 19th-century improvements came about. Spring-pole lathes had both power and speed – they were a good choice for turning chair parts. And they are easy to make – my lathe is cobbled together from junk boards, bungee cords, and decking screws, just...
I began to research the different ways these axes were made after I decided I wanted to have one custom made to my specifications. There are two styles of sockets: blind and through. The blind socket is mostly seen on hewing axes (single and double bevel) as well as other small axes. The through socket is mostly used on larger axes, such as the felling axe. There are some smaller axes and side axes that also utilize the through socket, but these are quite rare. As you might imagine, these tools are hard to make. They involve multiple forge welds, some involving thin metal stock. You might wonder why this design was produced at all – there are simpler ways...
With a bit more understanding, and an awful lot of gusto, I set to work restoring the loom. My internal archaeologist told me that I needed to take detailed photos with scales in black-and-white, medium-format film in order to properly record the state of each piece before I irrevocably changed it. With this done, I separated the pieces that were sound from those that needed serious work, and at random chose the most difficult piece of the whole restoration: the right-hand cape. Its ends were fine, but insects had chewed and bored through the wane present in the middle of the piece on two faces. I cut a 1/4"-deep grave (recess for a patch) from one face and a 1/2"-deep...
That year, the kids met the woman who, in the minds of many, came to embody the whole Foxfire project. Arie Carpenter, better known as “Aunt Arie” to the students, was born in 1885 and lived alone in a mountain cabin after her husband passed away. She grew her own food, drew water from a hand-dug well, and in the words of one student, was “the wisest, kindest, most giving human being I had ever met.” Wigginton recorded, “Ask any of those students who met her – even if only once – about Aunt Arie, and chances are each will look down at the ground, pause a moment, and say something like, ‘I loved her.’” Aunt Arie would become a...
A further advantage is that the drawknife can be used almost anywhere – I can fit the template, drawknife, vise, and auger to affix the vise into a backpack and walk to wherever I want to work. This simplicity replicates the work practices of the Jimmy Possum chairmakers, and also allows me to go to the materials rather than having them come to me. In a time when there were no automobiles to transport materials, it was much easier to bring back lighter finished components (as the bodgers did) than to transport the heavy timber to a workshop or factory to process. The model of production that is stationed at the source of the materials circumvents the pin-balling of modern...
Nobody I’ve ever met wishes their shop time was more like Henry Ford’s assembly line. Most of us seem to pick up saw, plane, and chisel as an act of independence and individual creativity. We want to cultivate the ability to make our own stuff. Author Matthew Crawford has argued that manual crafts are “a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life.” But we’re mistaken if we think we can shortcut this cultivation of skill with a new app or “life hack.” As we strive for agency, we can easily overlook...
The middle class was growing by leaps and bounds at the beginning of the 19th century, demanding cheap consumer goods. Retail showrooms, an ancestor of Rooms To Go, started popping up and eating into chairmakers’ profits. Windsor chairmakers quickly adjusted, redesigning their chairs, changing their joinery techniques, increasing their division of labor, and using interchangeable parts to speed up the chairmaking process. Did the Industrial Revolution really start in a chair shop? Early 19th-century chairmakers were fast. Really fast. In her book, Windsor-Chair Making in America, Nancy Goyne Evans calculates that a chairmaker making batches of two dozen side chairs – starting from the log and using all hand tools – could have a chair ready for finish in about...
Folk cultures around the world (including in Appalachia) have been built primarily around oral, rather than written, tradition. In song, story, and lore, truths and values were conveyed to the next generation and maintained over centuries. But to us rationalist moderns, this ancient way of recordkeeping seems imprecise and vague. Folklore scholar Richard M. Dorson describes our rather haughty perspective: “To the layman, and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy, and distortion. Or it may conjure up pictures of granny women spinning traditional tales in mountain cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances.” Dorson, a defender of the value of folklore, invokes in these words the unconscious bias that many today harbor toward indigenous, poor,...
My grandparents had a couple volumes of the Foxfire series on their bookshelf, and I was captivated by them from a young age. I remember thumbing through Foxfire 2 again and again, amazed at the knowledge captured in those pages that seemed so outside of my own experience. Spinning wool into yarn, wild plants as food and medicine, and a spring-pole lathe, of all things! Who ever heard of that? And this knowledge seemed alive, because it was often conveyed through direct quotes from the skilled individuals who still practiced those arts. Rather than a dry historical treatise, this information had vitality. There was magic here, and I was entranced. Fast forward an odd number of decades, when I found...
