Ancestry Magazine

One of the surprises in my lifetime has been the change in the sound of a construction site. Where I once heard hammering and hand-sawing, I now hear the sound of air compressors, nail guns, and power saws. It’s not uncommon to hear music, too—at least until the neighbors complain.

 

Basically, you can’t build a house or most anything else today without electricity. And the tools used now—ones commonly available in home improvement stores—are very different from my grandfather’s tools, mostly courtesy of power. We don’t do things, including woodworking, the way that our great-grandparents did. And to understand how they tackled certain tasks, we may have to use a little imagination.

 

Have Tools, Will Hammer

Carpentry is a very old trade, with almost no barrier to entry; any man could try his hand at it. Success tends to be a product of what you know, not how strong you are (as with smithing) or how tall you are (as with ancestral basketball). Almost everyone I know has used a hammer and a saw before, and can ken what the kin did with the same tools. With the right tools, just about anyone can make anything out of wood.

 

Wood itself is an amazing material. It’s a renewable resource. It can be carved or even bent and shaped. It was once a living thing, and no two pieces of wood you touch are exactly the same.

 

Working with it isn’t like working with anything else. First, there’s the smell. Different woods have different smells and different attitudes. And there’s the feel. Work with yellow pine and then switch to white pine: the latter, you’ll see, is lighter, easier to saw, and feels drier to the touch.

 

If you work wood with a saw, you might learn that some saws work on the “pull stroke” and some (most western saws) on the “push stroke.” Regardless of how many times your dad tells you how you’re supposed to do it, it’s still a special experience the first time you learn to “let the saw do the work.”

 

And then there’s patience. Kids like to rush through things, but if you rush woodwork, you get a poor result. Anyone who’s worked with wood long enough learns a different pace. You might remember your grandfather as someone who seemed to move slowly. If he was wise to the ways of wood, there might have been a reason—he might have found a different rhythm to doing things.

 

Pre-Historic and Pre-Hammers

There are at least three pre-historic (meaning before people made and kept written records) periods for tool use, and people worked wood in all of them. People first worked wood using sharpened stones, then bronze tools, then iron tools. They fashioned bows and bowls, and they made spears and spokes and wheels and wagons, using tools with names like “spokeshave.” They made axes and adzes for building huts and houses. But since the 18th century, most people have focused on steel tools.

 

Nouveau Old

Tools of the 1800s have been replaced today with tools made of steel and plastic, tools that contain their own batteries, or tools that get power through a cord or an air hose.

 

I have a tool room in my basement; I call it the “Room of Inner Peace.” It’s a manly room with a bare concrete floor, lots of pegboard and shelves, and a workbench with a vise mounted on one end. I like to imagine leading my great-great-grandfather, James Ivey Sharbrough, the one who was furloughed at the Battle of Vicksburg, through my shop, swapping stories about tools with him.

 

James was born in 1825 and served as a pretty old private in the “War Between the States.” He enumerated himself and his family in the 1880 census. I imagine our conversation would go something like this:

 

“What is this, some kind of hammer?” James would say.

 

“Sure, it’s a plain old hammer,” I’d respond.

 

“This isn’t plain, it has some soft stuff around its handle. And it looks like it’s made of a single piece of metal.”

 

“Right. Like I said, it’s plain.”

 

Now James would correct me. “Hammers in my day had two parts—a wooden handle and a metal head with a hole through it, called an eye. The wooden handle went through the eye, and a small metal wedge was pounded into the top of the handle. If the wedge came loose while swinging the tools, the head would fly across the room.”

 

“It flew off the handle?” I’d say, suddenly enlightened. I always wondered where that phrase came from.

 

“This hammer is too light,” he’d continue. “You could build a cabinet with it, but you would need something heavier to frame a house.”

 

“We don’t use hammers to frame houses any more,” I’d say.

 

“You don’t use hammers? How do you join the boards? What do you use instead of nails?”

 

“We still use nails, but we use nail guns to put them in. It’s like a stapler, only stronger.”

 

“Does it have bullets?”

 

“Nope, compressed air. Kind of like the hurricanes you had in Mississippi, the ones that would blow straw through wood. We use the same forced-air power to put the nails in.”

 

“You don’t spend a whole day swinging a 24-ounce hammer? Where is the challenge in that?”

 

“We still have challenges,” I’d say. “Our wives inspect our work.”

 

James Ivey would recognize a plumb (a weight on a string used to indicate a vertical direction). But he wouldn’t recognize my noisy little battery-operated laser that sucks up to the wall and shines a red line around a corner.

 

He would recognize a bubble level, a miter box, and a chalk line—it’s hard to replace some things. He would admire my measuring tape. He might have had a cloth tape, rolled up when not in use, but he couldn’t hold it out in the air to reach the other end of the measurement. James had to attach one end and walk away from it.

 

We still have to do many of the same things that our ancestors had to do. We need shelter, so we have to create it. We want furnishings in our shelter, and depending on what we’re looking for, sometimes we have to build those. If we want the look and feel of old-world craftsmanship often that means we have to recreate it.

 

But the big difference between then and now is that tools today are a lot more powerful—performing any woodworking task is faster and easier. We have electricity when we need power. When that power goes out in the middle of a project, we stand around and complain until it comes back on. But our ancestors were their own sources of power. And they made very little noise about that.

 

 

Beau Sharbrough is a popular genealogical writer and lecturer. Reach him through www.rootsworks.com.