“Shaker furniture is often misrepresented. Because most collectors and curators only want to show the very best of Shaker design, the same 100 objects are carted around to exhibition after exhibition, printed in book after book. They never exhibit the piece that didn’t work or the ones that were clunky, mis-proportioned, painted an ugly color, too plain, too fancy, too primitive, or too derivative of Victorian fashion, but these are all legitimate Shaker-made objects, too. They served a purpose and were well-used over several generations. This myopic presentation gives the public a skewed perspective on our work that does not do our legacy justice, and it has given birth to the sentimental notion that Shaker craftsmen made chairs laboring under...
“As the unique traits of every culture shape its woodworking traditions (and vice versa), the North Woods traits of adaptability and mobility wove themselves into the way indigenous craft evolved. The tools themselves developed to meet these criteria, being portable, versatile, and endlessly repairable. They could all be used one-handed, with the other hand (often in conjunction with the body and feet) providing the necessary workholding. Only four tools (with variations of each) composed the “tool-box” of the Northern maker, and every necessary wooden object (from spoons, bowls, and snowshoes up to canoes and shelters) could be made using this minimalist kit. Modern practitioners of this ancient means sometimes refer to it as the “Four-tool Philosophy.” Nick Dillingham, a skilled...
The onset of the Industrial Revolution caused major changes in virtually every craft. Machinery worked on a scale and at a cost that a pre-industrial artisan could not compete with, and the advent of canals and railroads meant that the village artisan had to contend with rivals not just across the next hill, but across the country. But as profound as that change was, something even more traumatic happened; the fundamental axioms were turned upside down. This change disrupted how the buying public valued good work. This shift happened in part because the Industrial Revolution rose alongside the emergence of nation-states that competed against one another for industrial dominance. This trend developed into National Exhibitions to showcase advances in industry...
There is a valuable lesson in this for today’s woodworkers: We need to be careful about where we derive our standards of “good” work and sense of appropriate tolerances. Sometimes this means separating truth from myth. We need to recognize that modern dogma about engineer-like precision and glass-smooth secondary surfaces is an anomaly in the history of craft. As these photographs reveal, tear-out, knots, and coarse plane tracks are normal characteristics of hand work throughout history. It’s not sloppy or slipshod. It’s normal – even for the Shakers who aimed for perfection in all their efforts. As Brother Arnold explained to us, dealers and curators have developed a mythology around Shaker furniture in order to market these objects at art...
Historically, workbenches were remarkably simple affairs. Peter Nicholson’s 1812 bench featured just a simple planing stop in the benchtop – not even one hole for a holdfast. Other historic images of benches show workpieces secured with nails, by a rope held by the worker’s feet, and even by the worker’s weight as he sits on the board being planed or the table leg into which a mortise is chopped. The main distinction of this style of work is that the workpiece is restrained by the worker, rather than by some mechanical device. It is not as if more rigid workholding solutions weren’t available to period craftsmen (as we will see), but it’s clear that they consciously chose to work without...
When the time comes around to pore over our authors’ newly submitted rough drafts, I can't help but reflect on the process for past issues of the magazine. It might be because we print the magazine “just” twice per year, or because we invest ourselves so heavily into our authors’ worlds and spend a ton of time with each and every sentence, or because we intentionally don’t recycle content, but every published article sticks out in memory with a funny or compelling story behind it. Some, you might easily guess. For example, spending days hanging out with Roy Underhill for Issue Eight was a riot. We went for lunch one day at his favorite local burrito joint, then strolled to...
The main structure of Hay’s cabinet shop was built in the 1740s at the bottom of a ravine on a Williamsburg back street. A later extension, appended to the west wall of the original structure, spanned a small stream that snaked its way through the ravine. Never made to power early machinery, the stream, combined with the gully and locale, likely made for cheap real estate. The potential savings were offset over time by the stream’s slowly destructive interaction with the building’s foundations. Anthony Hay and successors – Benjamin Bucktrout and Edmund Dickinson – were kept busy by the stream’s constant encroachments. While the business thrived until Dickinson’s 1776 enlistment in the First Virginia Regiment, the building slowly fell into...
Where then can the workmanships of risk and certainty be found? Neither are strictly time- bound, that’s for sure. Not only can free workmanship with hand-guided tools be found today, but its antithesis, the workmanship of certainty, has been around from antiquity. “The workmanship of certainty has been in occasional use in undeveloped and embryonic forms since the Middle Ages.” This concurs with Jonathan Thornton’s observation that “the aim of the careful worker in the European tradition was to reduce variation by skill and increasingly, by ever more complex tools.” Pye explains that the most common reasons for employing the workmanship of certainty are speed or accuracy – both especially important for quantity production. In Pye’s thought, it’s an oversimplification...
Wood has always been integral to the world we live in, and it’s still the best material for many jobs. Consider the power lines held in the sky, suspended over our houses and streets by millions of wooden poles. Even things so seemingly disconnected from trees – concrete structures such as bridges and skyscrapers – depend on plywood forms. Many houses are made of wood, as are the cabinets and furniture in them. Wine and whiskey are still aged in wooden barrels. All of these are carryovers from the old wood culture that we mostly take for granted. Because of modern industrial processes and extensive international trade, it’s hard to imagine these products were at one time related to whole...
At the larger end of the scale, a number of timber-framed cottages at St Fagans demonstrate the use of curved tree trunks that have been book-matched to provide gable ends, the shape of the roof being determined by the natural curve of the trunk. This is an efficient way of working given that once felled, the tree would require little shaping before being incorporated into the frame of the cottage, and the use of curved timber ensures there is little grain runout (which would reduce the strength of the frame). This raises the question in my mind at least: Might the craftsmen who were framing cottages also have been building stick chairs? A similar approach has been identified in extant...
