Life Support

There are as many different kinds of carpentry as there are people who perform the work, which is not unique to carpentry by any means, one could say the same things about the preparation of food or the practice of law. When it comes to historic work, as it relates to the field of carpentry more broadly, there are ethical choices to be made which are perhaps less common in other areas of the trades.

If historic buildings lasted forever in perfect condition, there would be no need for my profession. In a temperate but harsh environment like Vermont, where fortunes wax and wane, and prosperity blooms next to abject poverty, the fortunes of Vermont’s buildings can diverge wildly.

More often than not, when I am called to examine a structure I’m tasked not only with forensically examining the original building, but also determining what repairs and alterations were made, and, most importantly, why. I have seen some truly extraordinary barns patched together with repairs that convey an almost frantic feeling, as generations of farmers on tight budgets did whatever they had to do to keep the building up, even as they became obsolete.. The barn was kept alive for one more year, then another, then another. It is immensely gratifying to finally be the one to come in and do substantial, long-lasting repairs, to give a building a chance to breathe, and to vindicate the struggle to keep the building intact.

Given that, it can be tough to look down on poor-quality work being done to historic buildings in Vermont, because whatever the outcome, one would hope that it at least is in service of extending longevity. Problem is, bad repairs by well-meaning contractors can destroy originality, or irrevocably obfuscate important information. Ultimately the work will have to be redone. Not in 10 or even 20 years perhaps, but eventually. Worst case, the work can seem as though it were done with an almost malicious intent, and undermines the building’s structural whole. I have seen this. We are lucky to be in a state with a caring populace and a vibrant preservationist movement, and we need to better establish that historic buildings are fundamentally different, and need specialist treatment. A tax lawyer may be ill suited to jump into a murder trial, a pastry chef might hesitate at working a pit BBQ, an F1 driver might not feel prepared to race in the World Rally Championship. Every field has its specialists and specializations, and I’m grateful so many know that our field even exists.

Originality

After several years of scrimping, saving, and patiently waiting, I purchased a home in Roxbury, Vermont, right on the edge of the Green Mountains. I will be writing a bit more about the place as I delve deeper into it; the broad strokes are that it’s a mid-19th century hill farm exemplary of that type of quintessential high-posted cape which is as close as you’ll ever get to identifying a vernacular Vermont style of architecture.

The best part about the house is its originality. The town records state that the house was built in the 1870s (though I have reasons to believe the house is older), and after changing hands a few times it was bought in 1940 from an out of state family who only ever used it as a summer place for a few weeks a year. In effect the house is almost entirely untouched since the 1940s, and even then very little was done to it, just necessary maintenance. The previous owner kept meticulous records for 80 years about everything he did to the house, which is a habit I am continuing. As I explore the house I’ll do my best to update things here; we can explicate, explore and remediate this little house together, and perhaps add these entries to the ongoing chronicle of the house, which bears the moniker of Primrose Hill. Here’s my favorite pair of facts about the house so far: didn’t get electricity until 1986, and indoor plumbing came just a few years later.

Timber Frame vs. Post and Beam

This is a question I'm often asked - what is the difference? I'm all too guilty of forgetting that the differences between a tie-beam, a plate, and a girt are spatial and functional, even though they’re all beams that tie posts together.

Quite simply, all timber frames are post and beam. They rely on beams lying across posts to perform the basic structural function. However, not all post and beam buildings are timber frames. A post and beam building is a timber frame only if there is no metal in its joinery. That's another thing that is amazing about timber framing - a magnificent old barn or church is often built using wooden, furniture-like joinery, secured only with wooden pins. That's one of the reasons that engineers don't necessarily like timber frames - unlike steel structural elements, timber elements cannot always be given uniformly precise values of strength in engineering terms. Timbers are, and for hundreds of years have been, 'very strong' and unlike the modulus of breaking which can be calculated in steel or concrete to a high degree of accuracy, timbers are deemed either sufficient or not. This is changing in some of the more recent ASTM standards on timbers, but timber framed buildings rely on established precedent, knowledge about wood, and gut instinct more than math. Indeed, I have worked on barns where a huge quantity of steel was installed by engineers to reinforce the building, but it was so heavy it was actually causing the barn to collapse. Removing the steel and doing historically correct timber repairs brought the barn back to where it should be, and in the owner's words, 'it lifted back up.' There are timber framed barns that are hundreds of years old - wooden joinery is just fine for most of us, and even gives these buildings a little flex to expand, contract, and move, much more so than steel. Not better, as such, but good enough that we never have to stop doing timber joinery for substantial buildings. Thank goodness. 

Posts? Yes. Beams? Yes. Timber Frame? No.

The Full Works

Archaeological preservation, and preservation of landmarked buildings, are made simpler by the fact that many of the country’s most significant structures are unoccupied, have been considered of note for some time, and are usually managed by a nonprofit, or organization with a dedicated fundraising function.

This relationship means that the building is cared for and curated almost as an objet d’art, and the whole history of professional scholarship on conservation is brought to bear, with rafts of experts and distinguished academics weighing in on how to most sensitively treat the most remarkable and delicate buildings. Individual restoration projects can take several years, and are exhaustively documented.

This, in an ideal world, is how all significant buildings should be treated. However, money and time are no object only for a select few.

There are several routes to historic veneration. Of course there is simply the happy accident of a building being host to a notable historic event or personage. The building could also be so singular, so unique, and so significant to architectural and cultural history, that its role as a milestone confers admission to the club. There are also buildings as artifacts, which is the piece that concerns us the most here.

With the building as artifact, where a structure constitutes an eloquent essay on the lives and times of the past, originality is enormously important. New England is full of early houses, remarkable houses, but, perhaps somewhat unfairly, the houses that get all the glory are the most photogenic ones that have survived with originality intact. In addition, often overlooked are the small, badly treated farmhouses, the little country stores, and dissolving outbuildings.

The issue here is that the last 150 years, and particularly the last century, have seen such radical developments in the way we live, and their associated conveniences, that the centuries-long evolution of buildings could be tossed out on its ear, almost in its entirety.

I am not an Eric Sloane, raving blindly and piteously against the modern age and its supposed decadences. This is a fallacious behavior that one can find evidence of throughout history. Every generation believes it is the first to yearn for the past, in the same way that each generation believes it is the first to discover sex. We live in an extraordinary age of ease, and the upshot as far as historic buildings are concerned is that we can radically and cheaply alter at any moment any aspect of the buildings which reared us to suit the tastes of the moment. I do not subscribe to the idea that life was necessarily better in Ye Olde Good Olde Days; my argument is largely an aesthetic and emotional one. I'm not part of that school of cracker-barrel and pitchfork sentimentality, but I do believe that old, well tended houses and buildings are utterly serene, and beautiful. Even in the dyspeptic gingerbread of a Queen Anne roofline, one can find balance.

We can double glaze, install oil burners and forced hot air, air conditioning, linoleum and formica kitchens, fiberglass insulation, drywall, popcorn ceilings, vinyl siding, and asphalt roof shingles. We can install foam-core doors, plastic crown molding, aluminum storm windows, thin ‘hardwood floors’ and recessed lighting. We can carve a house into apartments and awkwardly nail in bathrooms with an almost amphibian-like level of enthusiasm.

A most troubling behavior in the treatment of an old house is the fondness for open living: building a sort of hangar-like space for milling around, cooking, eating, watching television, and having shouted conversations. Old rooms with a logical flow and intimacy are beaten together into a single huge chamber, leaving unpleasant proportions, ragged floors, and perhaps Fuseli-esque ranks of beams crudely ‘exposed,' smeared with Minwax Golden Oak stain, and varnished.

I understand that not all old houses are nice places to live – sometimes the rooms can seem warren-like, stifling, and dark. Not all old house designs are perfect, and many times the house has had a very hard life. In effect, some of the animals are more equal than others. In most cases, however, the framing and lines of the house are as clean and sturdy as they ever were. It can tell you many things, if you know where to look.

The service Arcadia Restorations offers is our most bespoke. Namely, it is to reverse the work of bad renovation euphemistically referred to by real estate agents as ‘restoration.’ Our craftsmen are capable of investigating and researching a building, both academically and forensically, to make the best conclusions as to its original layout and features. We will design, with you, a house with options available to its original makers, or containing the sort of sensitive, incremental improvements that may have been made in the intervening decades. In many cases, our best effort will still be something of an homage, albeit a sensitive and well-researched one.

We can make reproduction windows with restoration glass, and hang them in well-sealed openings that restore their proper function. We can make millwork by hand, and build joinery, cabinetry, and furniture that would likely be correct for the house. We can fulfill the dual role of carpenter and joiner, which were historically two separate fields. The small irregularites of handmade and hand-finished surfaces give a subtly natural, undulating, variegated look with a beauty which is as indisputable as it is serene. We can restore proportion, and scale. 

We can remake a historic house to a state consistent with architectural history and vernacular style, rather than a state of multilation in the service of modish whims, or, to be more just, when straitened circumstances necessitated bottom-dollar improvements. A carefully restored house should allow you to live a moden life, but in a state as though you had always been able to care for the house, and to tend it well through small transitions over centuries, so that the house and its occupants evolved in concert, harmoniously.

An original, well-cared for home, sensitively adapted and lived in, feels like no place else. Every bad remodeling inflicted upon a good house takes it further and further from being considered worth saving. Eventually it will be a small matter to simply knock it down when it can stand no further face-lifting. What we seek to do is build an ancestral home, meaning a house that would have been comprehensible to each of one’s ancestors, going back to the house’s construction. This state of continuity, this state of being a touchstone, is what may someday earn a house its historic status. In two hundred years, our time now will be halfway back to the days of the early American Republic. Even a sensitive interpretation done in the 21st century may one day be a valuable artifact to those in future who would seek to understand the built environment of our earliest years. What Arcadia Restorations provides is a huge repository of knowledge and skill, the kind only found in old books, or handed down, and combats the damage done by insatiable hawkers of appliances, consumer goods, magazine subscriptions, upvote culture, and shoddy building materials. 

Used Book Review

ANCIENT CARPENTERS' TOOLS

HENRY C. MERCER, BUCKS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 1975

It may have happened to you, as it has to me: the sensation of holding an implement or object in one’s hand, the purpose of which is unknown. It’s usually what happens when I’m looking through a bucket of rusty farm tools in an antique shop, or, more likely, forgotten in a corner of someone’s barn. It's a tough truth that many of the tools that get left somewhere to become part of the humus from whence they came are broken, unremarkable, unwieldy pieces of rural life that were quite justifiably discarded when a better alternative presented itself. That said, some pieces of rusty junk can be incredibly eloquent about their time and place, if only their function weren’t obscured by ignorance.

At the Danville Inn, the Algonquin Hotel of my part of northern Vermont, a certain regular has gotten in the habit of bringing an odd tool or household implement to Saturday’s buffet dinner that he himself may not know the purpose of, and it is passed from table to table at the inn and openly discussed, so that by the time it makes the rounds back to its owner, the assembled company are amused, perplexed, confirmed in their cleverness, or left grasping in the dark. Past entries have included a part of a bain-marie, a fireplace toast rack, and an accusatory-looking brass priapus mounted horizontally on a swiveling oak stand, which much to my relief turned out to be a form for repairing gloves. One that still irks me was a small rosewood octagon, about one inch in diameter and 3/8” thick, which had a small adjustable brass blade screwed to one facet, like a plane iron. It was beautifully made, but I have no earthly idea what it was made for. Were I a luthier, perhaps I would know. One problem is that some tools were made by one craftsman for one unique purpose, or one unique workspace. For much of the history of the American colonies and beyond, the only way to have tools was to make them yourself. The irons and blades might have been imported from Sheffield, but to save on shipping costs, a craftsman would fashion tool handles and bodies after their arrival. Making tools was no stranger a practice than making the final objects themselves. When you’re making absolutely everything by hand, and doing so repeatedly, any economy that can result from having a tool perfectly adapted to your needs makes custom tooling an effort worth expending, and some craftsmen found singular and creative solutions to their needs, which may remain forever mysterious to those who come across their tools decades later.

An 18th century engraving,used by Mercer to illustrate the saw handle in the foreground as a very early type, rare in the American colonies. 

It’s for these reasons that a book such as Henry Mercer’s admirable Ancient Carpenters’ Tools is one of my favorite compendia. It’s the answers to the riddles, the morphology of the tools given voice. It’s page after page of getting to have the sensation of remembering something you’ve been trying to claw into the light from the edge of memory. It’s the epiphany of a name half-recalled snapping into crisply-syllabled focus. It’s also incredibly interesting when read cover-to-cover as a whole, much as is Charles Hummel’s astonishing With Hammer In Hand (indeed, Mr. Hummel furnished the foreword for this edition of Ancient Carpenters’ Tools, which is better than any laudatory bumf on the cover could do in terms of lending it weight and legitimacy, though this book predates Hummel's ponderous tome by decades). Mercer’s book is genuinely a significant one in the context of the history of technology. Calling the book’s tools ‘ancient’ may strike us as odd, because the overwhelming majority are of 17th and 18th century design. Mercer himself was a Harvard-educated lawyer and archaeologist who headed up American archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania’s museum. By the late 1890s Mercer was lecturing on tools as archaeological artifacts, and collecting interesting examples out of trash heaps. When he ran the Bucks County Historical Society, he essentially opened a dedicated tool museum. When you consider that in the late 1890s the tools that were in use were still pre-power tool evolutions of the ‘ancient’ tools he writes about, one can see that Mercer was way ahead of his time in terms of serious study of everyday objects. When he published Ancient Carpenters’ Tools for the first time in 1929, he himself didn’t think anyone would read it, but it’s become an authoritative guide to hand tools, albeit primarily American and European ones. The term ‘Ancient’ may have been to lend archaeological gravitas to a subject Mercer felt slightly insecure about, but it also shows that the divide in his mind between manufactured and handmade was likely the same as the divide between modern and ancient. It’s been through several editions: my copy is the 1975 fifth edition, just because I’m a Charlie Hummel fan-boy. I think I bought it on AbeBooks for a few bucks. Amazon is selling a 2016 reprint of the 1950 edition. Why 1950 is anybody’s guess.

This truly ancient tool, found in a well in England, is only superficially different from English infill planes of the 19th century. 

Some of my favorite entries in this book are the ones on ancient Roman tools, because if you found them in a workshop today they might not jump out as being 2000 years old. Tools such as claw hammers, files, planes, pincers and augers are only superficially different, and in some cases not different at all. Each page, accompanied by photographs and historic artwork showing artisans at work (mythological or earthly), is wonderfully arranged and written. It is quite literally a glossary of ancient language, and one thing I noticed in particular about axes was how subtle the specializations in each one’s particular purpose were. I suppose an axe isn’t a terribly complicated thing to make, but the physical demands of axe-work would make very fine levels of specialization an obvious choice. Axes for hewing timbers have handles which curve away from the heads so that hands clear the log, and less contortion is needed. Asymmetrical bulges in splitting axe heads help wedge, pop and cleave wood along the grain of a swing, and adzes show innumerable variations in the sweeps of their heads and handles, as standing slightly bent over and smoothing a timber beneath one’s feet is agonizing work without a tool which is essentially bespoke to each user’s purpose. The morphology of lathing and shingling hatchets is even illuminating. The flat top of the axe is needed to clear the ceiling while pounding in nails at the top of a wall. It’s this kind of special knowledge that gives any tool nerd a frisson, because one becomes a party to revealed knowledge – the same kind of power as knowing how a magic trick is done, except that the destruction of the mystery in the case of tools is highly enriching, and satisfying. This volume will certainly form a cornerstone of my reference library for when I eventually write my authoritative ‘Ancient Carpenters’ Books.'