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A Museum of Early American Tools
Eric Sloane's Tools
By Eric Sloane
In a PBS interview Eric Sloane once said “Closing your hand around
a warm wooden hammer handle is like being with the man who wore it smooth.”
He collected antique tools for a lifetime. Each of them is made with care,
each a marvel of mass, of line, and of texture. His collection of tools
can be seen intact at the Stanley-Sloane Museum on Route 7 in Kent, Connecticut.
The Stanleys donated the brown stained shingle structure on 12 acres just
south of Kent Falls. On site are the remains of an old iron furnace, which
produced pig iron from 1826-1892, a fitting accompaniment to the collections
showcased here. The rolling fields and wooded acreage would make artist
and collector, Eric Sloane (1905-1985) smile, for this is a beautiful
spot.
The open interior of the main exhibition hall is simply furnished and
equipped with a cathedral ceiling, from which hangs Sloane’s collection
of early flags. His tools are displayed in a combination of open space
simulating various workshops as well as in showcases. Tools are arranged
by their intended task, with carpentry things together, farming implements
in another space, and lumbermen’s tools separate from those. Labels
in his distinctive lettering style and accompanying sketches punctuate
each exhibit, and along with his tools, are synonymous with the Colonial
Movement itself. The presentation follows the style used in his 38 books,
a combination of hand lettering and line drawings that lay out the art
and method of using tools to do just about any task. Museum assistant,
Barbara Russ reminds us, “The art of remembrance of the older and
better ways of doing things pervades the atmosphere and brings Sloane’s
voice back to this hallowed space.”
Yesterday’s laborer
The bedrock of Sloane’s philosophy is the moral worth of the man
on the street – the carpenter, joiner, lathe splitter, roofer, wheelwright,
farmer, lumberman, nail maker, or axe-grinder. This is a particularly
American spirit, and a sense of community pride can be seen in just about
every example in the collection. In Reverence for Wood, Sloane tells,
“During the Civil War, the upheaval of American society resulted
in much ugliness and some deterioration of taste. Before that time, agriculture
and the preservation of tradition were a cherished part of the good life,
but from then on the philosophy of ‘change for the sake of change’
became the dominant force in American thinking.” Hasn’t he been
saying that older ways are better ways ever since the publication of his
first book? Didn’t he tell us that the poorest folk got better nutrition
than the rich do today with their diet of over-processed foods?
Sloane felt that it is important to remember, when comparing the past
to the present not to allow modern wonders to awe one into believing that
all changes are synonymous with progress. He felt that the ‘old ways’
are not necessarily the inefficient ways. He asks us to imagine what could
happen to the modern house without electricity in winter. The furnace
would cease working, there would be no lights and no cooking, and the
plumbing would burst without something old-fashioned in the house like
a fireplace, cook-stove, or candles. He suggests that the smallest village
with its own water-powered mills was actually more self-sufficient a 150
years ago than the average metropolis of today. Progress and speed, in
his opinion, have become more treacherous as they march on.
Monuments to the past
His displays of the tools of yesteryear are monuments to the achievements
of past generations. Countless ice-cutters are memorialized in the tools
they used. They bring back memories of ice-houses so large that fog would
develop inside them. There are saws, wedges, mauls, and froes (for use
in splitting a block of wood into shingles) to remind us of the lumberman’s
craft. There are plows, scythes, hayforks, and sledges that accompany
other farming implements; and chisels, gouges, planes, and joiners’
tools bring back memories of carpenters and furniture makers. There are
carriage makers’ tools, blacksmith things, and even a dog-powered
treadmill in old blue paint that operates a butter churn. There are spuds
used for harvesting tree bark for the tanning industry, and other oddities.
There is a tool for every job and he collected these tools as works of
art.
His love of wood is evident from displays of shovels and forks made from
single boards. There is a grain storage container hollowed out from a
massive tree trunk, and rows of handmade brooms, each worn smooth by the
hands that used them. He didn’t just focus on the axe-head, but on
the handle as well. He loved beautiful shapes made of wood, like the doughboy
on stand, which he also included in one of his paintings. And he was fascinated
with the whimsical as well, such as the wooden cowbell on display. In
addition to the many hand tools, there are also wonderful machines like
an old treadle lathe. In viewing this collection, it is evident that Eric
Sloane is teaching us about American yesterday. We are acutely aware that
he was not only a painter, but a teacher.
Honest and beautiful and lasting
When reading his many books, it’s exciting to find imagery in the
use of words like ‘barn relics.’ But what a perfect name for
items like snow knockers used to knock snow away from horses’ hooves
in winter, or for a pie peel, created to lift pies from the oven. These
are tools forgotten by most modern Americans. The quarryman’s mud
spoon would stump the best of us, yet he knew it was used to dip stone
dust from drilled holes in quarries. He shows us a tiny yoke used on a
goose, a cheese maker’s curd cutter and stirrer, a large winnowing
scoop that he used in one of his paintings, eel spears, wooden swingling
knives for flax, and a wooden lard squeezer.
In his 1964 book A Museum of Early American Tools, Sloane invites his
readers to see it as a scrapbook that will induce musing and reflecting
and draw the reader back to the quite different world of early America.
He says that the rambling sequence of subjects (like his museum) is no
accident: he wants to see his readers ‘stroll’ through the book
just as they would through a museum. He lauds the qualities of the early
tools and mocks today’s tools whose “virtues” include the
cheapness of mass production. He also reminds us that lumber of yesterday
that was cut and sold as “two by four” was once an honest two
inches by four inches; even though today people can be shocked to learn
that our lumber, because it is measured before being planed and trimmed,
is sold at a quite untrue measurement.
And so it goes. Sloane reminds us that the craftsman of yesterday wasn’t
pathetically poor. “His ways were honest and lasting and beautiful
to an extent that is today deemed over and above requirements,” he
states. “How poor and dishonest and ugly and temporary are the results
of so many modern workers whose constant aim is more to make the most
money from their profession instead of producing the most honest and beautiful
and lasting things.”
Shaking hands with your ancestors
“Holding an old tool,” he said, “is like shaking hands
with your ancestors.” For Eric Sloane, who was fascinated with the
technical aspects of tools and their uses, was a relentless and unapologetic
romanticizer of early life in America. He was like a pioneer detective
of sorts, who knew the many uses of these strange and unfamiliar tools.
He was a man who knew his wood, he knew his trees, and he talked about
the various strengths of wood, knowing that nature made the strongest
shapes. He knew that convoluted grain in a burl maul makes for strength.
And he showed us that the convenient tree crotch made the best shelf bracket
or harness hook designed by nature to hold weight. This is a man who used
an old ironwood plane for a paperweight, and a man who took our best memories,
our most purposeful times, and gave them back to us.
Sloane-Stanley Museum,
Route 7, P.O. Box 917,
Kent, CT 06757,
(860) 927-3849,
open Mid-May to October.
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