Part 14 (1/2)
Make it, said I--ay, when he undertakes it, He'll make the thing and make the thing that makes it.”
The boy's jack-knife was a possession so highly desired, so closely treasured in those days when boys had so few belongings, that it is pathetic to read of many a farm lad's struggles and long hours of weary work to obtain a good knife. Barlow knives were the most highly prized for certainly sixty years, and had, I am told, a vast popularity for over a century. May they forever rest in glorious memory, as they lived the happiest of lots! To be the best beloved of a century of Yankee boys is indeed an enviable destiny. A few battered old soldiers of this vast army of Barlow jack-knives still linger to show us the homely features borne by the century's well beloved: the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution cherishes some of colonial days; and from Deerfield Memorial Hall are shown three Barlow knives whose picture should appear to every American something more than the presentment of dull bits of wood and rusted metal. These Yankee jack-knives were, said Daniel Webster, the direct forerunners of the cotton-gin and thousands of n.o.ble American inventions; the New England boy's whittling was his alphabet of mechanics.
In this connection, let us note the skilful and utilitarian adaptation not only of natural materials for domestic and farm use, but also natural forms. The farmer and his wife both turned to Nature for implements and utensils, or for parts adapted to shape readily into the implements and utensils of every-day life. When we read of the first Boston settlers that ”the dainty Indian maize was eat with clam-sh.e.l.ls out of wooden trays,” we learn of a primitive spoon, a clam-sh.e.l.l set in a split stick, which has been used till this century. Large flat clam-sh.e.l.ls were used and highly esteemed by housewives, as skimming-sh.e.l.ls in the dairy, to skim cream from the milk. Gourd-sh.e.l.ls made capital bowls, skimmers, dippers, and bottles; pumpkin-sh.e.l.ls, good seed and grain holders. Turkey-wings made an ever-ready hearth-brush. In the forests were many ”crooked sticks” that were more useful than any straight ones could be. When the mower wanted a new snathe or snead, as he called it, for his scythe, he found in the woods a deformed sapling that had grown under a log or twisted around a rock in a double bend, which made it the exact shape desired. He then whittled it, dressed it with a draw-shave, fastened the nebs with a neb-wedge, hung it with an iron ring, and was ready for the mowing-field.
Sled-runners were made from saplings bent at the root. The best thills for a cart were those naturally shaped by growth. The curved pieces of wood in the harness of a draught-horse, called the hames, to which the traces are fastened, could be found in twisted growths, as could also portions of ox-yokes. The gambrels used in slaughtering times, hay-hooks, long-handled pothooks for brick ovens, could all be cut ready-shaped.
The smaller underbrush and saplings had many uses. Sled and cart stakes were cut from some; long bean-poles from others; specially straight clean sticks were saved for whip-stocks. Sections of birch bark could be bottomed and served for baskets, or for potash cans, while capital feed-boxes could be made in the same way of sections cut from a hollow hemlock. Elm rind and portions of brown ash b.u.t.ts were natural materials for chair-seats and baskets, as were flags for door-mats.
Forked branches made geese and hog yokes. Hogs that ran at large had to wear yokes. It was ordered that these yokes should measure as long as twice and a half times the depth of the neck, while the bottom piece was three times the width of the neck.
In the shaping of heavy and large vessels such as salt-mortars, pig troughs, maple-sap troughs, the jack-knife was abandoned and the methods of the Indians adopted. These vessels were burnt and sc.r.a.ped out of a single log, and thus had a weighty stability and permanence. Wooden bread troughs were also made from a single piece of wood. These were oblong, trencher-shaped bowls about eighteen inches long; across the trough ran lengthwise a stick or rod on which rested the sieve, sea.r.s.e, or temse, when flour was sifted into the trough. The saying ”set the Thames (or temse) on fire,” meant that hard work and active friction would set the wooden temse on fire.
Sometimes the mould for an ox-bow was dug out of a log of wood. Oftener a plank of wood was cut into the desired shape as a frame or mould, and fastened to a heavy backboard. The ox-bow was steamed, placed in the bow-mould, pinned in, and then carefully seasoned.
The boys whittled cheese-ladders, cheese-hoops, and red-cherry b.u.t.ter-paddles for their mothers' dairy; also many parts of cheese-presses and churns. To the toys enumerated by Rev. Mr. Pierpont, they added box-traps and ”figure 4” traps of various sizes for catching vari-sized animals.
Many farm implements other than those already named were made, and many portions of tools and implements; among them were shovels, swingling-knives, sled-neaps, stanchions, handles for spades and bill-hooks, rake-stales, fork-stales, flails. A group of old farm implements from Memorial Hall, at Deerfield, is here given. The handleless scythe-snathe is said to have come over on the _Mayflower_.
The making of flails was an important and useful work. Many were broken and worn out during a great thres.h.i.+ng. Both parts, the staff or handle, and the swingle or swiple, were carefully shaped from well-chosen wood, to be joined together later by an eelskin or leather strap.
The flail is little seen on farms to-day. Thres.h.i.+ng and winnowing machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared thres.h.i.+ng with a flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the ”Poor Farm” on Quonsett Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn of that beautiful and spa.r.s.ely occupied country home, two powerful men, picturesque in blue jeans tucked in heavy boots, in scarlet s.h.i.+rts and great straw hats, were thres.h.i.+ng out grain with flails. Both men were blind, one wholly, the other partially so--and were ”Town Poor.” Their strong, bare arms swung the long flails in alternate strokes with the precision of clockwork, bringing each blow down on the piled-up wheat-straw which covered the barn-floor, as they advanced, one stepping backward while the other stepped forward, and then receded with mechanical and rhythmic regularity, a step and a blow, from one end of the long barn to the other. The half-blind thresher could see the outline of the open door against the sunlight, and his steps and voice guided his sightless fellow-worker. Thus healthful and useful employment was given to two stricken waifs through the use of primitive methods, which no modern machine could ever have afforded; and the blue sky and bay, with autumnal suns.h.i.+ne on the piled-up golden wheat on floor and in rack, idealized and even made of the threshers, paupers though they were, a beautiful picture of old-time farm-life.
Wood for axe-helves was carefully chosen, sawed, split, and whittled into shape. These were then sc.r.a.ped as smooth as ivory with broken gla.s.s. Some men had a knack that was almost genius in shaping these axe-helves and selecting the wood for them. In a country where the broad-axe was so important an implement--used every day by every farmer; where lumbermen and loggers and s.h.i.+pwrights swung the axe the entire day for many months, men were ready to pay double price for a well-made helve, so shaped as to let the heavy blow jar as little as possible the hand holding the helve. One Maine farmer boasted that he had made and sold five hundred axe-helves, and received a good price for them all; that some had gone five hundred miles out west, others a hundred miles ”up country”; and of no one of them which he had set had it ever been said, as of the axe in Deuteronomy, ”When a man goeth into the wood to hew wood, and his hand fetcheth a stroke with the axe to cut down a tree, then the head slippeth from the helve.”
A little money might be earned by cutting heel-pegs for shoemakers.
These were made of a maple trunk sawed across the grain, making the circular board thin enough--a half inch or so--for the correct length of the pegs. The end was then marked in parallel lines, then grooved across at right angles, then split as marked into pegs with knife and mallet. A story is told of a farmer named Meigs, who, on the winter ride to market in company with a score or more of his neighbors, stole out at night from the tavern fireside where all were gathered to the barn where the horses were put up. There he took an oat-bag out of a neighbor's sleigh and poured out a good feed for his own horse. In the morning it was found that his horse had not relished the shoe-pegs that had been put in his manger; and their telltale presence plainly pointed out the thief. These shoe-pegs were a venture of two farmer boys which their father was taking to town to sell for them, and in indignation the boys thrust on the thief the name of Shoe-pegs Meigs, which he carried to the end of his life.
When the boys had learned to use a few other tools besides their jack-knives, as they quickly did, they could get sawed staves from the sawmills and make up shooks of staves bound with hoops of red oak, for mola.s.ses hogsheads. These would be s.h.i.+pped to the West Indies, and form an important link in the profitable rum and slave round of traffic that bound Africa, New England, and the West Indies so closely together in those days. A constant occupation for men and boys was making rived or shaved s.h.i.+ngles. They were split with a beetle and wedge. A smart workman could by sharp work make a thousand a day. There may still be occasionally found in what were well-wooded pine regions, in shed or barn-lofts, or in old wood-houses, a stout oaken frame or rack such as was at one time found in nearly every house. It was known as a bundling-mould or s.h.i.+ngling-mould. At the bottom of this strong frame were laid straight sticks and twisted withes which extended up the sides. Upon these were evenly packed the s.h.i.+ngles, two hundred and fifty in number, known as a ”quarter.” The withes or ”binders” were twisted strongly around when the number was full. The mould held them firmly in place while being tied. These were sealed by law and s.h.i.+pped. Cullers of staves were regularly appointed town officers. The dimensions of the s.h.i.+ngles were given by law and rule; fifteen inches was the length for one period of time, and the bundling-mould conformed to it.
Daniel Leake of Salisbury, New Hamps.h.i.+re, made during his lifetime and was paid for a million s.h.i.+ngles. During the years he was accomplis.h.i.+ng this colossal work he cleared three hundred acres of land, tapped for twenty years at least six hundred maple-trees, making sometimes four thousand pounds of sugar a year. He could mow six acres a day, giving nine tons of hay; his strong, long arms cut a swath twelve feet wide.
_In his spare time_ he worked as a cooper, and he was a famous drum-maker. Truly there were giants in those days. I love to read of such vigorous, powerful lives; they seem to be of a race entirely different from our own. Still, among our New England forbears I doubt not many of us had some such giants, who conquered for us the earth and forests.
One mark the s.h.i.+ngling industry left on the household. In the sawing of blocks there would always be some too knotty or gnarled to split into s.h.i.+ngles. These were what were known in the vernacular as ”on-marchantable s.h.i.+ngle-bolts.” They formed in many a pioneer's home and in many a pioneer school-house good solid seats for children and even grown people to sit on. And even in pioneer meeting-houses these blocks could sometimes be seen.
Other fittings for the house were whittled out. Long, heavy, wooden hinges were cut from horn-beam for cupboard and closet doors; even shed doors were hung on wooden hinges as were house doors in the earliest colonial days. Door-latches were made of wood, also oblong b.u.t.tons to fasten chamber and cupboard doors.
New England housekeepers prized the smooth, close-grained bowls which the Indians made from the veined and mottled knots of maple-wood. They were valued at what seems high prices for wooden utensils and were often named and bequeathed in wills. Maple-wood has been used and esteemed by many nations for cups and bowls. The old English and German vessel known as a mazer was made of maple-wood, often bound and tipped with silver.
Spenser speaks in his _Shepheard's Calendar_ of ”a mazer yrought of the maple wood.” A well-known specimen in England bears the legend in Gothic text:--
”In the Name of the Trinitie Fille the kup and drinke to me.”
Sometimes a specially skilful Yankee would rival the Indians in shaping and whittling out these bowls. I have seen two really beautiful ones carved with double initials, and one with a Scriptural reference, said to be the work of a lover for his bride. Another token of affection and skill from the whittler were carved busks, which were the broad and strong strips of wood placed in corsets or stays to help to form and preserve the long-waisted, stiff figure then fas.h.i.+onable. One carved busk bears initials and an appropriately sentimental design of arrows and hearts.
On the rim of spinning-wheels, on shuttles, swifts, and on niddy-noddys or hand-reels I have seen lettering by the hands of rustic lovers. A finely carved legend on a hand-reel reads:--
”POLLY GREENE, HER REEL.
Count your threads right If you reel in the night When I am far away.