Category: Historical Images

We have scientific writers of several kinds, and their number is continually increasing; there is no harm in that, but their studies are mainly directed to form theorists capable of ordering workmen, but unable to put their own hands to the work. Banish to their country seats the most celebrated engineers, and they will be as embarrassed to perform the smallest thing for themselves, as our statesmen, magistrates, professors, poets, painters, and wealthy merchants.

If a lamp leaks, a coffee-pot is broken, a screw lost, a lock damaged, or a chair on three legs—and for a thousand other petty trifles—they must send to the neighboring town. If it is an emergency, a messenger on horseback must be dispatched, with perhaps a kettle round his neck, and a couple of watering-pots in his hand: there is no poor Robinson Crusoe to be found in these oases of luxury and indigence.
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Get a Kit of Tools and Learn How to Use Them

See to it, good farmer friend, that your wife or handy daughter has a kit of tools for her own use. By a “kit,” I mean the very-much-needed articles of your workshop that she has to use and borrow from you (perhaps forgetting to replace them). For instance: Hammer, gimlet, hand-saw, (always kept in good trim), a box of mixed nails and screws, screw-driver, and, strange as it may sound, a mitre-box and a double glue pot.

You will be surprised to find how much of your very valuable time will thus be saved; and you may also be astonished at the amount of good work in carpentering accomplished by the good ladies of your household. A discarded mitre-box and a few feet of molding, left by a busy workman as a donation to the good wife, resulted in a very durable and handsome picture frame that gave great pride to the home manufacturer.

The girl of to-day is beginning to look to cabinetmaking and other branches of industry that heretofore were looked upon as the sole domain of her more favored brother. Well, encourage the girls in the use of necessary tools on a farm. Then perhaps we men folks shall have a few less hingeless, knobless doors to look after on a rainy day. Or perhaps we might get the girls to repair a broken fence if the cattle got out when we were away thrashing.

Kendall Perry

Farm Journal – December, 1906

—Jeff Burks

“It is surprising,” said an intelligent workingman, “to notice the change that machinery of all kinds has worked in the different trades within comparatively few years. For a time there was an objection to machine work of all kinds as not being equal to hand work, but this has worn away and machinery rules everywhere.”

“In the trade of a blacksmith machinery has made great changes and actually new trades; but there is one trade which machinery in recent years has killed, that of the cabinet-maker. I have known hundreds of good cabinet-makers, after serving a long apprenticeship, finding that machinery has taken away their occupation, to become house carpenters straight away and are now earning good wages.”

“I do not think,” he continued, stroking his chin reflectively, “that contractors will be able to do without house carpenters or lay bricks by machinery for many years yet, which is one comfort.”

New York Telegram – c. October, 1887

—Jeff Burks

Surprising Possibilities of Dilapidated Mahogany

Two ardent amateur collectors of old mahogany recently entered a shabby looking shop together in search of a bureau of a type they scarcely dared hope to find, and, to the amusement of one of the two, the other pounced eagerly upon a very dilapidated chest of drawers and a bureau in equally bad shape, and got them for $4.50 and $5, respectively. In response to the query. “What can you possibly do with such junk?” she said:

“You know all those pieces you admire at my house? “Well, some were worse than these, and I have done them over myself on rainy days, only having an old carpenter come in for a few hours to put in braces where needed. I have a regular scraper that every hardware shop can supply, and a file to roughen it up when needed, and with this, some boiled linseed oil and a cabinetmaker’s glue-pot-on-heater, I work wonders and amuse myself for weeks at a time.”
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Women are now “Doing Over” Their Own Furniture

Whether the fad for collecting old pieces of mahogany furniture—most of it being in unpresentable condition—is responsible for the new direction given to woman’s energies, or whether it is merely an effort to invade a hitherto little known field of work—one in which the majority of the sex is interested, however—the fact has become known that furniture restoring and renovating are added to the list of accomplishments approved by the practical woman.

She may be a housewife or she may be living in tiny quarters by herself, but if there is room anywhere for the few tools required in the simpler lines of cabinet work, she spends an hour or more now and then in improving the appearance of her Heppelwhite desk or polishing a candle stand until its value is increased, while its charm is more than doubled.
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