Included in his investigation of the life, tools and a detailed look at the furniture of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847), a rural Maine minister and craftsman, author Joshua A. Klein also presents an overview of 38 pieces built by this Harvard-educated renaissance man. Below is number 10, a charming child’s desk, from “Hands Employed Aright.”
Wood(s): maple or birch; legs are an unknown hardwood (possibly beech)
Inscriptions/stamps: sticker on cubby lid “Desk made by Rev. Jonathan Fisher Blue Hill, ME. (1791-1847) Lonnie E. Davis got it in 1948-9 fr. James Fisher bequest to MA Dodge 1955”
From the collection of: Jonathan Fisher Memorial
Construction: The desk is made of butted and nailed construction. The legs protrude up through bottom as corner reinforcement and were nailed from the outside. Everything is nailed together through the adjacent face. The nail holes appear to have been puttied. The top has a hinged scalloped decoration. The apron also has scalloped decorative pieces nailed to the undersides of the front and sides. The desk lid’s hinges are face mounted. The writing surface end grain is covered by a 1⁄4″-thick decorative carved strip. There are turned balls on the front corners. The top-hung drawer is butted and nailed with cut nails. The drawer runners are nailed from the bottom up into the desk with cut nails. The inside cubby is divided into four compartments. The small hinged cubby door is on wire cotterpin hinges. The writing surface has a lock attached with nails. The bottom is nailed in place from all sides. There is yellow paint residue in cracks and dark yellow putty in the nail holes. On and around the hinges are remnants of red paint. Red pigment is visible on the drawer underside. The desk underside has pink chalky residue.
Tool Marks: There is considerable tear-out on the inside of one of the legs. There are some sash sawmill marks on the desk bottom. The bottom was planed with a fore plane. Most surfaces are smooth (perhaps due to later sanding during refinishing). The apron scallops have chisel facets and there is a saw kerf visible between scallops. There are divider center points on the scalloped details on the aprons. There are fore plane marks on the drawer face. The drawer bottom is rough and irregular. There are chisel facets on the top scalloped detail.
I implored Chris to let me have this one day of the 2020 gift guide to share a favorite of mine: the long-blade model of the R. Murphy Hand Carving and Dental Lab Knife. I inherited this knife and other hand tools from my grandfather, and it’s the only tool of his that I use on an almost-daily basis when I’m at the bench.
It’s great for scooping out relief cuts on the backs of tails and making flat cuts at the baseline to remove that scoop of waste. I also use it for quickly cleaning out any lingering waste at the base of pin boards.
Sure, you can use a chisel for relief cuts, but it’s not quite as efficient or comfortable. I’ve found this narrow-knife blade, with its flat cutting edge and comfortable handle, the fastest and most satisfying tool for these relief cuts I make on almost every one of my projects (I cut a lot of dovetails).
In fact, I like it so much that I just ordered a backup. It’s available from a number of stores for about $20, but I went right to the source: R. Murphy.
I think my grandfather used this knife for chip carving – so if you’re into that (or dental lab work of some kind), it’s multi-purpose!
A detail of the 1888 photograph seen earlier shows a chimney as well as windows in the chamber (upper floor) of Fisher’s shop. Approximately 60 years earlier, there was a small windmill on this roof to power his sawmill, lathe and grindstone. – Jonathan Fisher Memorial.
Who better to write a book about Jonathan Fisher, a late 18th century/early 19th century Maine woodworker and preacher, than Joshua Klein? Like Fisher, Joshua and his family are homesteaders in rural Maine, doing their best to live completely off the land. And Joshua is using in his own shop many of the same types of tools that Fisher had in his collection (not a surprise to those who know Joshua as the founder and editor in chief of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, a periodical that celebrates the preservation, research and recreation of historic furniture). As the crow flies, the Kleins live about 7 miles from Fisher’s Blue Hill farm.
In November 1810, Fisher began building a model of a “wood house.” Never one for technological stagnation, Fisher envisioned a building next to his house that was dedicated to producing lumber on a wind-powered sawmill that would also power his lathe. As a lumbering town, Blue Hill had numerous water-powered sawmills in Fisher’s days, but on his property at the top of the hill, Fisher had no access to a river or stream. What he did have, especially after years of clearing his property, was wind.
Although the memories of New England’s windmills are nearly faded, their abundance, especially along the coastline, is well documented. (2) As early as the 17th century, windmills (primarily for grinding grain) were being built in areas of New England without direct water access so they were not an unusual sight by the early 1800s.
As commonly known as they were, however, the construction of such a mechanism was beyond the skill of most craftsmen. One author has noted that the millwright’s job required a precision and care equal to the shipwright’s. The vision of a rural farmer building a windmill to saw his own lumber is quixotic. It seemed a project doomed to fail.
Although water mills were much more common in Maine, New England, as a whole had many windmills, especially along the coast. – Drake, Samuel Adams, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, Harper & Brothers, 1876, p 344.
Reading through the journals during the two-and-a-half-years of construction of the mill is agonizing, especially as the recorded tally of his investment that included his own labor rises at $1 per day (the same rate as Joseph Murphy, a cabinetmaker of South Berwick (3) ) in the midst of numerous frustrated attempts at sawing.
We know the mill was generating power as early as April 1812, because Fisher recorded having his grindstone running “by wind.” After investing substantially and working on it for more than two years, Fisher recorded on April 19, 1813: “Worked upon saw gear and made an attempt to saw wood. Broke the [?]. Greatly disappointed in my hopes. Endeavored to resign to the will of God but found it a hard trial. I doubt not, however, but God intends good by this cross. Expense of wood house, etc. = $215.50.” The next day all that is recorded is: “Made a new experiment to carry my saw for sawing wood by wind – discouraged in it. Laid it aside = $216.50.”
Despite his discouragement, Fisher carried on and a few days later wrote, “first commenced sawing wood, with some, though small, good effect.” From here, only periodic sawing is recorded. The anticlimactic success of the sawmill is startling after so much labor and expense.
The roof of this Estonian spinning wheel shop was equipped with a small windmill for powering woodworking machinery. Fisher’s was probably similar. – Courtesy of Lost Art Press.
The wind power was also harnessed to drive the lathe. June of that year, Fisher documented: “Worked upon turning gear and set my lath a-going by wind.” Powering lathes with water power was common in production shops but wind-powered lathes were much less common. It’s hard to envision the practicality of such a setup. The irregularity of the wind must have been a challenge to deal with for the turning he was doing. The idea is not unprecedented, however. Windmill historian, Roy Gregory, has documented the use of an 8.5′-tall tower mill in a Lancashire, England, shop that powered a lathe and circular saw. The mill is described as having four 8′ long common sails with gears for regulating speed (4). Ants Viires, a historian of Estonian woodcraft, has photographed a small tower mill attached to the roof of a mid-20th-century spinning wheel workshop. It is likely that Fisher’s was similar in size.
The design of the wood house’s lathe is unknown. In Fisher’s room-by-room probate inventory taken in 1847, it listed a lathe and its chisels in the barn of which his son, Willard, was half-owner. Because two of the existing poppets do not fit the surviving lathe, it is assumed that Fisher had another lathe in the shop that was discarded when that building was taken down. Because no lathe (or any workbenches, for that matter) are listed in the probate inventory, it may be that these shop fixtures were built-ins. Often, probate inventories exclude these items because they were considered part of the shop building.
Although we know Fisher built at least two lathes, this is the only one that has survived.
It is apparent that Fisher achieved his primary goal with this windmill project because he was able to generate lumber to some degree. But it must not have revolutionized his production enough because in June 1821, he disassembled the tower of his mill, never to speak of the mill in action again. Neither the 1824 Morning View painting nor the 1888 photograph of the wood house show any evidence to testify to the existence of the mill.
The up-and-down “sash” saw marks from the mill can still be seen on the inside and backside of much of Fisher’s casework.
That Fisher referred to a least a portion of his wood house as his “shop” suggests that he eventually moved his tools out of the barn and into this dedicated space. The transition between workspaces must have been gradual because the installations of a new workbench and lathe are carried out over time amidst other woodworking projects. It is also conceivable that there always remained a small shop space in the barn for convenience sake.
In June 1823, Fisher was busy setting up his “shop chamber.” He moved his grindstone to a new location, built a “cupboard” for tool storage, constructed a portable workbench and installed a new stove. The reconfiguring of this workspace was likely due to his feeling “the infirmities of old age creeping stealthily upon him.” Perhaps this rearrangement facilitated his work.
This detail from Fisher’s A Morning View of Blue Hill Village shows the arrangement of the Fisher homestead from the side. Moving from left to right, we see the original barn, the hog house and some other outbuildings, the original red house attached to the yellow 1814 addition and finally the black “wood house.” – Jonathan Fisher, A Morning View of Blue Hill Village, 1824, oil on canvas, 25-5/8″ x 52-1/4″, Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Museum Purchase, 1965.1465.134.
2. Lombardo, Daniel, Windmills of New England: Their Genius, Madness, History & Future, On Cape Publications, 2003. 3. Burch, Abby, By His Account Rendered: The Business of Cabinetmaking in York County, Maine, 1815-1840, a modified master’s thesis, 2008. 4. Gregory, Roy, The Industrial Windmill in Britain, Phillimore & Co., 2005.
“Make a Joint Stool from a Tree,” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee, was an early Lost Art Press book – published in 2012, not too long after Christopher Schwarz left Popular Woodworking. Eight years (and change) later, there are but a couple hundred copies left, so it’s time to go back on press. And that’s an opportunity to rethink the “form factor”; the new version will have a printed hardbound cover (and add a new preface from Peter Follansbee).
To make room in the warehouse for the new printing, LAP has reduced the price on the remaining first editions to $27. So if you’re a first edition kind of person and don’t already have this one, now is the time.
I – and possibly Bean – will be on @bench.talk.101 today from 3:30-4:30 p.m. EST to talk about my enduring love for tool chests (and current obsession with the Dutch tool chest form in particular) and cats. You can join the conversation by clicking: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81164688577?pwd=b1ZOOWgzQi9ZeExsVDYyWkJMNXdkQT09 at about 3:30.
Or click on the link in the @Bench.Talk.101 Instagram bio, which will appear 5 minutes before the meeting is about to start.
P.S. These meetings are recorded and published on the Bench.Talk.101 YouTube channel, so by joining the conversation, you are giving permission for the talk to be recorded and the recording to be made public for all to enjoy. You can watch previous episodes on the Bench.Talk.101 YouTube channel.
