JACK-KNIFE INDUSTRIES
Chepa Rose was one of those old-time chap-men known throughout New
England as "trunk pedlers." Bearing on his back by means of a harness of
stout hempen webbing two oblong trunks of thin metal,--probably
tin,--for forty-eight years he had appeared at every considerable
farmhouse throughout Narragansett and eastern Connecticut, at intervals
as regular as the action and appearance of the sun, moon, and tides; and
everywhere was he greeted with an eager welcome.
Chepa was, as he said, "half Injun, half French, and half Yankee." From
his Indian half he had his love of tramping which made him choose the
wandering trade of trunk pedler; his French half made him a good trader
and talker; while his Yankee half endowed him with a universal Yankee
trait, a "handiness," which showed in scores of gifts and
accomplishments and knacks that made him as warmly greeted everywhere
as were his attractive trunks.
He was a famous medicine-brewer; from the roots and herbs and barks that
he gathered as he tramped along the country roads he manufactured a
cough medicine that was twice as effective and twice as bitter as old
Dr. Greene's; he made famous plasters, of two kinds,--plasters to stick
and plasters to crawl, the latter to follow the course of the disease or
pain; he concocted wonderful ink; he showed Jenny Greene how to bleach
her new straw bonnet with sulphur fumes; he mended umbrellas, harnesses,
and tinware; he made glorious teetotums which the children looked for as
eagerly and unfailingly as they did for his tops and marbles, his
ribbons and Gibraltars.
One day he came through the woods to John Helme's house carrying in his
hand a stout birchen staff or small tree-trunk, which he laid down on
the flat millstone imbedded in the grass at the back door, while he
displayed and sold his wares and had his dinner. He then went out to the
dooryard with little Johnny Helme, sat down on the millstone, lighted
his pipe, opened his jack-knife, and discoursed thus:--
"Johnny, I'm going to tell you how to make an Injun broom. Fust,
you must find a big birch-tree. There ain't so many big ones now
of any kind as there useter be when we made canoes and plates and
cradles, and water spouts, and troughs, and furnitoor out of the
bark. But you must get a yallow birch-tree as straight as H and
edzactly five inch acrost. Now, how kin ye tell how fur it is
acrost a tree afore ye cut it off? I kin tell by the light of my
eye, but that's Injun larnin'. Lemme tell you by book-larnin'.
Measure it round, and make the string in three parts, and one
part'll be what it is acrost. If it's nine inch round, it'll be
three inch acrost, and so on. Now don't you forgit that. Wal! you
must get a straight birch-tree five inch acrost where you cut it
off, just like this one. Then make the stick six foot long. Then
one foot and two inch from the big end cut a ring round the bark;
wal! say two inch wide just like this. Then you take off all the
bark below that ring. Then you begin a-slivering with a sharp
jack-knife, leetle teeny flat slivers way up to the bark ring. When
it's all slivered up thin and flat there'll be a leetle hard core
left inside at the top, and you must cut it out careful. Then you
take off the bark above the ring and begin slivering down. Leave a
stick just big enough for a handle. Then tie this last lot of
slivers down tight over the others with a hard-twisted tow string,
and trim 'em off even. Then whittle off and scrape off a good
smooth handle with a hole in the top to put a loop of cowhide in,
to hang it up by orderly.
"Yes, Johnny, I've got just enough Injun in me to make a good
broom; not enough to be ashamed of and not enough to be proud of.
But you mustn't forgit this; a moccasin's the best cover a man
ever had on his feet in the woods; the easiest to get stuff for,
the easiest to make, the easiest to wear. And a birch-bark canoe's
the best boat a man can have on the river. It's the easiest to get
stuff for, easiest to carry, the fastest to paddle. And a
snowshoe's the best help a man can have in the winter. It's the
easiest to get stuff for, the easiest to walk on, the easiest to
carry. And just so a birch broom is the best broom a man or at any
rate a woman can have; four best things and all of 'em is Injun.
Now you just slip in and take that broom to Phillis. I see her the
last time I was here a-using a mizrable store broom to clean her
oven--and just ask her if I can't have a mug of apple-jack afore I
go to bed."
If this scene had been laid in New Hampshire or Vermont instead of
Narragansett, the Indian broom would have been no novelty to any boy or
house-servant. For in the northern New England states, heavily wooded
with yellow birch, every boy knew how to make the Indian brooms, and
every household in country or town had them. There was a constant demand
in Boston for them, and sometimes country stores had several hundred of
the brooms at a time. Throughout Vermont seventy years ago the uniform
price paid for making one of these brooms was six cents; and if the
splints were very fine and the handle scraped with glass, it took
nearly three evenings to finish it. Indian squaws peddled them
throughout the country for ninepence apiece. Major Robert Randolph told
in fashionable London circles about the year 1750, that when he was a
boy in New Hampshire he earned his only spending-money by making these
brooms and carrying them on his back ten miles to town to sell them.
Girls could whittle as well as boys, and often exchanged the birch
brooms they made for a bit of ribbon or lace.
A simpler and less durable broom was made of hemlock branches. A local
rhyme says of them:--
"Driving at twilight the waiting cows,
With arms full-laden with hemlock boughs,
To be traced on a broom ere the coming day
From its eastern chambers should dance away."
The hemlock broom was simply a bunch of close-growing, full-foliaged
hemlock branches tied tightly together and wound around with hempen
twine, "traced," the rhyme says, with a sharply pointed handle, which
the boys had shaped and whittled, driven well into the bound portion.
This making of brooms for domestic use is but an example of one of the
many score of useful domestic and farm articles which were furnished by
the natural resources of every wood-lot, adapted by the Yankee
jack-knife and a few equally simple tools, of which the gimlet might
take the second place.
It was so emphatically a wooden age in colonial days that it seemed
almost that there were no hard metals used for any articles which to-day
seem so necessarily of metal. Ploughs were of wood, and harrows;
cart-wheels were often wholly of wood without tires, though sometimes
iron plates called strakes held the felloes together, being fastened to
them by long clinch-pins. The dish-turner and cooper were artisans of
importance in those days; piggins, noggins, runlets, keelers, firkins,
buckets, churns, dye-tubs, cowles, powdering-tubs, were made with chary
or no use of metal.
The forests were the wealth of the colonies in more ways than one; and
it may be said that they furnished both domestic winter employment and
toys for the boys. The New England forests were full of richly varied kinds
of wood, suitable for varied uses, with varied qualities--pliability,
stiffness, durability, weight, strength; and it is surprising to see how
quickly the woods were assigned to fixed uses, even for toys; in every
state pop-guns were made from elder; bows and arrows of hemlock; whistles
of chestnut or willow.
The Rev. John Pierpont wrote thus of the whittling of his childhood
days:--
"The Yankee boy before he's sent to school
Well knows the mysteries of that magic tool--
The pocket-knife. To that his wistful eye
Turns, while he hears his mother's lullaby.
And in the education of the lad,
No little part that implement hath had.
His pocket-knife to the young whittler brings
A growing knowledge of material things,
Projectiles, music, and the sculptor's art.
His chestnut whistle, and his shingle dart,
His elder pop-gun with its hickory rod,
Its sharp explosion and rebounding wad,
His corn-stalk fiddle, and the deeper tone
That murmurs from his pumpkin-leaf trombone
Conspire to teach the boy. To these succeed
His bow, his arrow of a feathered reed,
His windmill raised the passing breeze to win,
His water-wheel that turns upon a pin.
Thus by his genius and his jack-knife driven
Ere long he'll solve you any problem given;
Make you a locomotive or a clock,
Cut a canal or build a floating dock:
Make anything in short for sea or shore,
From a child's rattle to a seventy-four.
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
Institution 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 noble 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-shells
out of wooden trays," we learn of a primitive spoon, a clam-shell set in
a split stick, which has been used till this century. Large flat
clam-shells were used and highly esteemed by housewives, as
skimming-shells in the dairy, to skim cream from the milk. Gourd-shells
made capital bowls, skimmers, dippers, and bottles; pumpkin-shells, 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 butts 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 scraped 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, searse,
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
butter-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 threshing. 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. Threshing and winnowing
machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared
threshing 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
sparsely occupied country home, two powerful men, picturesque in blue
jeans tucked in heavy boots, in scarlet shirts and great straw hats,
were threshing 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 sunshine 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 scraped as smooth as ivory with broken
glass. 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 shipwrights 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
molasses hogsheads. These would be shipped 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 shingles. 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 shingling-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 shingles, 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 shipped. Cullers of
staves were regularly appointed town officers. The dimensions of the
shingles 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 Hampshire, made during his lifetime and
was paid for a million shingles. During the years he was accomplishing
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 shingling industry left on the household. In the sawing of
blocks there would always be some too knotty or gnarled to split into
shingles. These were what were known in the vernacular as
"on-marchantable shingle-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 buttons 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 fashionable. 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.
June, 1777."
Perhaps some Revolutionary soldier gave this as a parting gift to his
sweetheart on the eve of battle.
On his powder-horn the rustic carver bestowed his best and daintiest
work. Emblem both of war and of sport, it seemed worthy of being shaped
into the highest expression of his artistic longing. A chapter, even a
book, might be filled with the romantic history and representations of
American powder-horns; patriotism, sentiment, and adventure shed equal
halos over them. Months of the patient work of every spare moment was
spent in beautifying them, and their quaintness, variety, and
individuality are a never-ceasing delight to the antiquary. Maps, plans,
legends, verses, portraits, landscapes, family history, crests, dates of
births, marriages, and deaths, lists of battles, patriotic and religious
sentiments, all may be found on powder-horns. They have in many cases
proved valuable historical records, and have sometimes been the only
records of events. Mr. Rufus A. Grider, of Canajoharie, has made colored
drawings of about five hundred of these powder-horns, and of canteens or
drinking-horns. It is unfortunate that the ordinary processes of
book-illustration give too scant suggestion of the variety, beauty, and
delicacy of their decoration, to permit the reproduction of some of
these powder-horns in these pages.
These habits of employing the spare moments of farm-life in the
manufacture from wood of farm implements and various aids to domestic
comfort, were not peculiar to New England farmers, nor invented by them.
The old English farmer-author, Thomas Tusser, in his rhymed book, _Five
Hundred Points of Good Husbandry_, written in the sixteenth century
(which Southey declared to be one of the most curious and formerly one
of the most popular books in our language), was careful to give
instructions in his "remembrances" and "doings" as to similar industries
on the English farm and manor house. He says:--
"Yokes, forks, and such other let bailie spy out
And gather the same as he walketh about;
And after, at leisure, let this be his hire,
To beath them and trim them at home by the fire."
_To beath_ is to heat unseasoned wood to harden and straighten it.
"If hop-yard or orchard ye mean for to have,
For hop-poles and crotches in lopping go save.
"Save elm, ash, and crab tree for cart and for plow,
Save step for a stile of the crotch of a bough;
Save hazel for forks, save sallow for rake:
Save hulver and thorn, thereof flail for to make."
The Massachusetts Bay settlers came chiefly from the vicinity, many from
the same county, where Tusser lived and farmed, and where his points of
good husbandry were household words; so they had in their English homes
as had their grandfathers before them, the knowledge and habit of saving
and utilizing the various woods on the farm, and of occupying every
spare minute with the useful jack-knife. The varied and bountiful trees
of the New World stimulated and emphasized the whittling habit until it
became universally accepted as a distinguishing New England
characteristic, a Yankee trait.
This constant employment of every moment of the waking hours contributed
to impart to New Englanders a regard and method of life which is spoken
of by many outsiders with contempt, namely, a closely girded and
invariable habit of economy. Children brought up in this way knew the
value of everything in the household, knew the time it took to produce
it, for they had labored themselves, and they grew to take care of small
things, not to squander and waste what they had been so long at work on.
This, instead of being a thing to sneer at, is one of the very best
elements in a community, one of the best securities of character. For
sudden leaps to fortune are given to but few, and are seldom lasting,
and the results of sudden inflations are more disastrous even to a
community than to isolated individuals, as may be abundantly proved by
the early history of Virginia. It was not meanness that made the wiry
New England farmer so cautious and exacting in trade, when the pennies
he saved sent his son through college. It was not meanness which made
him refuse to spend money; he had no money to spend, and it was a high
sense of honor that kept him from running in debt. It was not meanness
which so justly ordered conditions and cared for the unfortunate that
even in those days of horrible drunkenness often there would not be a
pauper in the entire village. It has been a reproach that in some towns
the few town poor were vendued out to be cared for; the mode was harsh
in its wording, and unfeeling in method, but in reality the pauper found
a home. I have known cases where the pauper was not only supported but
cherished in the families to whose lot she fell.