Rest for the Weary
Pride in Craft and Accomplishment
The completion of the Erie Canal, the first navigable water link between the Northeast and the Midwest, was cause for celebration. A grand procession was held with the participation of the various artisan societies, including 200 members of the Fancy and Windsor Chairmakers Society. We only have two examples of the banners they carried and both are loaded with messages.
In both banners there are examples of the furniture made by the Society’s craftsmen with the second banner including specific tools. “Rest for the Weary” is a clever way to advertise a chair, the product and also the benefit offered to the customer, a comfortable chair to sit in after a long workday. The illustration accompanying “By Industry We Thrive” is about commerce: the female figure and cornucopia symbolize peace and plenty, the chair at the front and the furniture in the middle ground are another reminder of the Society’s output, the ships in the background are the movement of goods between marker and market.
A third banner described in the Memoir had the motto “Support the Chair” with a double meaning. It was a compliment to the Governor of New York as well as an inducement to buy a chair. Regrettably, there is no illustration of eight boys carrying a large gilt eagle with a miniature chair in its beak.
By 1825, artisan or craftsmen associations and societies had been around for around about a half century. Participating in parades was a way to display pride in their craft, accomplishments and the contributions made by the skilled crafts in building the new Republic. It has to be noted the skilled women artisans and free black craftsmen were not invited to be part of the celebration. As for the unskilled workers that worked on the canal, they were nowhere to be seen.
Skilled craftsmen organized to protect the standards of the craft, settle disagreements between members, provide education, open libraries and provide mutual aid to members. Dues collected could be used to help injured or ill member and to support widows and children when a craftsmen died. Not all craftsmen chose to join these societies and were therefore not offered any of the protections of membership. Some societies were for masters and employers only. Journeymen, in turn, would form their own societies.
The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York was formed with 22 members from various crafts in 1785. They adapted the blacksmith’s hammer and hand as their emblem (and the blacksmiths borrowed the emblem from Hephaestus/Vulcan). The Carpenters’ Society of Baltimore was formed in 1791 and within a few years the carpenters would merge with other crafts to become the Baltimore Mechanical Society.
The Charleston Mechanic Society, with the motto “Industry Produceth Wealth,” formed in 1794 with an initial goal of preventing the hiring of skilled enslaved men over white craftsmen. A similar action was taken up by some Mechanic Societies in other Southern States.
In 1795 the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association was organized in Boston with Paul Revere as a founding member. One their initial aims was to do something about runaway apprentices.
In 1815, 17 skilled craftsmen groups formed the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association in an attempt to “counterbalance the dominance of local society by merchants.” In 1841 the Association commissioned banners for a Triennial Festival. The festival was organized to promote municipal pride and the contributions made by the skilled craftsmen of the city.
To Be One’s Own Master
In an article for the Department of Labor’s history of labor relations, Edward Pesson wrote, “Skilled workers – variously known as craftsmen, artisans or mechanics – received from seventy-five to one hundred percent higher wages than the unskilled. Some artisans owned homes, modest dwellings to be sure, yet sufficient to contain work area, kitchen, living quarters for the family and in some cases for servants or apprentices.
“The tools they owned and their proficiency in using them gave skilled workers marketable assets which enhanced their sense of worth. Working independently or with others as journeymen in small shops directed by master craftsmen, they could realistically anticipate becoming masters someday.”
Well before the Erie Canal celebrations of 1825, the master-journeyman relationship had changed. Master craftsmen had comfortable earnings and business networks that allowed them to enter the emerging middle-class. Journeymen came to realize they would very likely never advance to be a master of their own shop.
By the early 1800s craftsmen’s societies that were originally confined to one craft, or to groups of skilled craftsmen, had changed to include tradesmen and merchants. For the master craftsmen this meant a transition from a working master artisan to a capitalist.
Originally, this certificate and book plate from the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York were destined for the gallery along with other Mechanic Society documents. After reading a few chapters from “American Artisans: Craft Social Identity 1750-1850” edited by Howard B. Rock, the documents are worth a closer look as the symbols used reflect changes in the mechanic societies.
In the membership certificate the hammer in hand emblem is prominent and in the corners are scenes of craft and mutual aid: craftsmen at work, symbols of peace and plenty (top, left) and aid brought to a grieving widow and child. By the time the book plate was issued in 1822 the Society became a sponsor of the Mechanic Bank and the symbols of craft diminished. Although the Society had established a school and library for apprentices the emphasis was more on commerce relationships. In the plate two tradesmen, not leather-apron craftsmen, offer charity to a widow and direct her son to the apprentice school. The small hammer in hand floating on a cloud is “an apt symbol for masters who had ceased to be sweat-of-the brow artisans.” The hammer in hand symbol was not trademarked and was used by other businesses such as the Vulcan Spice Mill in Brooklyn. The owner of the mill later used the emblem on boxes of Arm and Hammer baking soda.
Rest for the Weary
The flipside of the chairmakers’ motto is the sheer number of work hours and stagnant pay of a journeyman. Work hours were sunrise to sunset, six days a week. In the summer this could mean working 14 to 16 hours with short breaks for breakfast and lunch.
Three New York City cabinetmaker price books illustrate the stagnation of wages. The first price book was issued in 1802. The next revision was not until 1817 and the third revision was in 1832. In the “History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928” by the Department of Labor. A portion of a price comparison table is below (pounds and shillings used in 1802 and 1817 were converted to dollars).
The 1802 book states “men working by the day are to be paid in proportion to their earnings by the piece, and find their own candles.”
Even with skilled craftsmen earning much higher wages than unskilled workers, living conditions of skilled craftsmen were crowded and lacked adequate sanitation. This was not unique to large cities like New York. Similar conditions were common in mid-size cities and towns in the South and Midwest. The workers that made up most of the urban populations owned 5 percent or less of urban wealth.
Entering a skilled craft and training for years with the promise of advancement, good wages to support a family and ultimately having enough to support oneself in old age was the expectation of a journeyman. In April 1809 the Carpenters’ Strike Manifesto was published in the American Citizen newspaper and addressed to the public. The Manifesto was from the Journeymen House-Carpenters and involved a strike to work for no less than 11 shillings per day. This statement explains the frustrations of the journeymen:
“Among the unalienable rights of man are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the social compact every class of society ought to be entitled to benefit in proportion to its usefulness, and the time and expense necessary to its qualification. Among the duties which individuals owe to society are single men to marry and married men to educate their children. Among the duties which society owes to individuals is to grant them compensation for services sufficient not only for the current expenses of livelihood, but to the formation of a fund for the support of that time of life when nature requires a cessation from labor.”
The Manifesto continues with an account of annual income and expenses. Using a base of 300 work days (Sundays and several days for possible illness or injury were deducted), earning 11 shillings per in day in the spring through autumn and 10 shillings through the winter, total annual earnings would be $400. After deducting expenses for house rent, firewood, food for the family, work clothes, replacement of worn or lost work tools and a small amount for contingent expenses the journeyman would have $42.50 left for the wife’s and children’s clothing, education of the children and family illnesses.
The Manifesto ends with “And now let us ask those that are fathers of families to judge what will be the amount of the surplus for the maintenance of old age?”
Readers from Philly may be asking why your city’s craft societies have not be mentioned. Fear not! In the next post your fine city will figure prominently in the struggle to improve the wages and work hours of journeymen.
The gallery has a few more mechanic society membership certificates and banners.
— Suzanne Ellison
Veritas Dowel Maker for Chairmaking?
In my Amercian Welsh Stick Chair classes, we start with home center dowels that have been selected for dead-straight grain for the chair’s back spindles and sticks. They work great (wood is wood), but there can be a lot of luck and driving around necessary to get enough sticks for a class of six to 12 students.
In fact, last year, I denuded the Kentucky/Ohio/Indiana Tristate area of straight-grain red oak dowels for my March 2019 class.
For my classes in the coming year, I decided to find a way to reduce my driving and gathering.
After trying many options (too many to list here without wanting to slap myself with a cold, dead mackerel), I settled on the Veritas Dowel Maker. I’ve used it before when making the sticks for Roorkee chairs.
The idea is simple: you spin square stock into the device. Two blades slice it down to size.
The only complication is that the device is a bit complicated to set up. After reading the instructions a few times, I went upstairs to see if the university had taken back my diploma. I simply wasn’t able to follow the instructions in a couple places. I needed a good video to understand what I’m missing here.
Sadly, there aren’t any really excellent videos out there on this tool. There are a lot of OK ones. After watching a few of them I was able to make the appropriate synapses and the device became crystal clear to operate.
With my stupidity set aside (for the time being), I made the blanks for my spindles. This was the joyous part. I could select the straightest, clearest stock to make spindles that were super strong.
After that, you spin the blanks into the device – a drill powers the operation. The surface finish on the dowels was pretty good. A single swipe with a scraper was enough to remove the annular rings. Another plus: I could fine-tune the dowels to come out at exactly the dimension I wanted.
After running 100 or so sticks, I decided to sharpen the blades and see if that improved the surface finish. So I stoned them both up to #8,000 grit on my waterstones (they sharpen just like a plane iron). The improvement in surface finish was minimal – I still need to scrape them.
All in all, I believe the Veritas Dowel Maker will pay for itself with my first class. It saves me a tank of gas, and I can make the sticks for a chair using $10 in wood instead of $24 to $36.
If I made only an occasional chair, I’d make the sticks the old-fashioned way with a spokeshave or block plane. But you need 50 perfect dowels with dead-straight grain, the tool is a nice thing to have.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Of course I paid full price for the Veritas Dowel Maker and the accessories. And the wood. And etc.
Meet the Author: C. H. Becksvoort
Christian Becksvoort was born in Wolfsburg, Germany. His father, who had spent seven years as a German apprentice, worked as a cabinetmaker. When Chris was 6, his parents decided to move to Toronto. But shortly before relocating to Canada, the Toronto church sponsorship fell through and Washington, D.C. became a last-minute alternative. In time, the family settled in Wheaton, Maryland – better school, better neighborhood.
As a child, Chris remembers building small wooden boats, model ships and historic schooners – “little things like that,” he says. “I always enjoyed making things and being outdoors.”
Chris’s high school had a nice shop, and he took four years of shop class. There he learned how to use power tools, tool safety, joinery methods and finishing techniques. Wood technology, however, was glossed over. He built a mahogany plant table “that was put together pretty well,” he says, but it cracked. When he asked his shop teacher why, his teacher simply said, “You didn’t let the wood move.”
Chris says at the time, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how wood movement worked or how to allow for it. (He later took one semester of wood technology in college.) His furniture now sells to clients all over the country, in many different climates.
“Sending it back to me is not an option,” he says, citing, in particular, substantial delivery costs. “Once I get paid I never see it again.”
And that’s how he likes it – his furniture is built to last generations, and this lesson he learned in high school has influenced the design of every piece he has made since. On his website, under “The Becksvoort Difference,” he writes, “I take wood movement seriously, over-building and compensating to ensure that your investment lasts.” He includes two examples: dovetailing all his mouldings and constructing telescoping web frames between his drawers.
Chris’s dad continued working as a cabinetmaker in the states, building furniture and doing architectural work, built-ins and kitchens. When Chris, who was still learning, turned 12, his dad, a perfectionist, hired him.
“Things didn’t go as well as they should have,” Chris says, counting the number of times he was fired and re-hired in one summer. “He was not the easiest guy to work for. So the last thing I wanted to do was be a woodworker for a living.”
Chris ended up at the University of Maine – far enough away that he couldn’t go home for a weekend but close enough that he could go home for a week’s vacation, he says. Plus, he enjoyed cold weather. He played intramural hockey (and, later in life, did speed skating for several years). He started out studying forestry, but switched to wildlife. The switch in majors required some summer coursework to catch up on credits. While taking a photography course he met a woman who would soon become his wife, Peggy.
After graduating in 1972, Chris got a government job at a wildlife research center in Maryland. Part of his job was feeding 600 Japanese quail. While he enjoyed the fact that everyone knocked off early on Fridays to go out for a beer, the work wasn’t what he expected, and wasn’t much fun (let’s just say another employee’s misplaced decimal point once meant the untimely demise of hundreds of birds). Woodworking, he said, was beginning to look not too bad after all.
So Chris returned to Maine and worked for a furniture manufacturer for nine years. He learned a lot, both about woodworking and running a business. Next was a gig with a large architectural millwork shop in downtown Portland. There he helped restore Victorian homes by working on stairways, windows and doors, and reproducing historic mouldings. “It was a real learning experience,” he says, as he describes using routers and shapers in heart-stopping ways.
In 1986, he opened his own shop. “I’ve been at it ever since, and it’s been a real challenging ride, to say the least,” he says.
‘That Shaker Guy’
“Mary mother of God. That’s Christian Becksvoort! He’s the modern master of Shaker style. I never dreamed that I would see him in the flesh.” — Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman, NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” season 5, episode 9.
Before Chris’s name became synonymous with Shaker furniture, he first became smitten with the form after seeing pieces in a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Little did he know that someday he would have the chance to reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his own shop.
Chris says his father built a lot of Danish-style, mid-century modern furniture. So Chris grew up admiring clean surfaces and with an understanding that less is often more. “I don’t want to interrupt a surface with fancy mouldings,” he says. He doesn’t like design that exists without a utilitarian purpose (ahem, gingerbread), anything that screams “hey, look what I can do” or anything that makes dusting difficult. “There’s no dirt in heaven,” he quips.
In his 1998 book “The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on an Enduring Furniture Style,” (The Taunton Press) Chris writes, “As a furniture maker, I not only value the Shakers’ considerable craftsmanship but also respect their insistence upon utility as the first tenet of good design. With the Shakers, there is no ego involved, no conscious effort to produce works of art. Austere utility is beautiful in and of itself, and often works of art are inadvertently produced.”
With full-width panels, Chris says web frames must be allowed to telescope to account for side-to-side wood movement, as shown here.
He not only appreciates the simplicity of Shaker furniture, but the construction methods used as well. “It’s clean,” he says. “But some of the construction is fairly complex. It’s well-designed.”
Chris says his biggest entry into Shaker furniture was being allowed to do maintenance and restoration work for Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining active Shaker community, in New Gloucester, Maine.
“If you want any repair work done I’ll do it for the cost of materials,” he said. They agreed, and it’s work he’s still doing today.
“From making display cases to replacing chair parts, restoring a sewing desk, replacing moulding, or assembling an entire built-in, my work with the Shakers has been rewarding, educational and, hopefully, mutually beneficial,” Chris wrote in “Shaker Inspiration,” his latest book from Lost Art Press. “Seeing the size, angle and spacing of dovetails cut 200 years ago, or taking apart a mortise-and-tenon joint and discovering that the edges were carefully chamfered, was a learning experience unlike any taught in school.”
Chris also rose in name recognition through his work with Fine Woodworking. Chris had heard about a guy who had a cool portable band saw so he drove to him, interviewed him and took pictures. He sent it all to Fine Woodworking and not only did they buy the article, but soon after they offered him a job. Not wanting to move to Connecticut, Chris agreed to a contributing editor position, which he has held since 1989. (You can read much of his magazine work here.)
He has written several books, including “The Shaker Legacy” (Taunton Press, 1998); “With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood” (Lost Art Press, 2013), which was originally published as “In Harmony With Wood” (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983) and “Shaker Inspiration” (Lost Art Press, 2018).
And for years he ran workshops and conducted lectures around the country.
As such, Chris says he’s been dubbed “that Shaker guy.” I ask if this has ever made him feel pigeonholed. Sometimes, he admits. But he’s also taken some creative liberties with design. For example, a traditional Shaker music stand is fairly straight forward and stiff – his are more fluid, “Shaker-inspired.”
“There are plusses and minuses,” he says. “But mostly it’s a good label.”
His work has resulted in a bit of fame. Fans regularly take the time to find and visit his showroom and shop, tucked away on a dirt road in the backwoods of Maine. Most visitors are kind and considerate, he says. He’s been featured on Martha Stewart’s show (you can watch the 2001 clip here). And actor, woodworker and writer Nick Offerman considers him a personal hero (Chris is featured in Nick’s book “Good Clean Fun” (Dutton, 2016) and Chris appeared in an episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which Nick plays character Ron Swanson).
“A major treat, and a great honor, was to be featured in Nick Offerman’s new book, ‘Good Clean Fun,’” Chris wrote on his blog in October 2016. “A whole chapter, no less!”
Crafting a Business
In “Shaker Inspiration,” Chris spends a lot of ink on the business of woodworking. He begins with the necessity of preparation and a solid business plan that includes a summary, organization, description, product line, market analysis and funding. He then dives into the importance of quality photos, advertising, catalogs, customer lists, customer records and time cards.
Pre-website days Chris could buy a 1”, black-and-white ad in The New Yorker for $800. Search the October 19, 1992, issue online and you’ll see one, on page 106, situated aside a review of Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Reservoir Dogs”:
Why invest in furniture from a
one-man shop on a dirt road in
New Gloucester, Maine?
CATALOG $5.00
C. H. BECKSVOORT
FURNITUREMAKER
Box 12, New Gloucester
Maine 04260. (207) 926-4608
These ads often led to a couple sales.
Additional business matters he addresses in his book include mailing lists, public relations, craft shows, galleries, selling direct, customer care and giving back.
“There were a lot of dead ends,” he says, when talking about the business side of things. He started collecting catalogs from other woodworkers, not to copy them but to be different. He learned that placing his work in galleries cut too much into his profits and unless a show was indoors and juried, he skipped them.
“After more than five decades, I can do the woodworking almost in the dark,” he writes in “Shaker Inspiration.” “It’s the business end that’s a constant challenge, and it keeps me on my toes.”
Chris eventually built a 14 x 20 showroom on his property. “It takes effort to find me,” he says. But a customer/fan who is willing to find him is one often willing to purchase a piece. And having a designated space where customers can see much of his work in person, touch surfaces, pull out drawers and run their fingertips over carvings has been a great benefit, he says.
He works alone and builds 20 to 30 custom pieces each year. They are all signed and dated, and each piece has an embedded silver dollar in it, secreted away to the delight of many customers. He estimates he’s built more than 850 pieces.
“I keep trying to retire but it’s not happening yet,” he says. “I keep saying to myself, ‘Where were these people 25 years ago?’” Right now he’s booked almost to Christmas. There are five to six pieces he would like to design and build for himself, “but the bills have to be paid first,” he says. Finding time for personal prototypes is difficult.
The Gift of Simplicity
Chris and Peggy have two children, a son and daughter, both now grown but within easy driving distance. They also have one grandson who likes to push his bulldozer through little piles of sawdust in Chris’s shop.
Still not a fan of hot weather, Chris says he enjoys Maine and the changing of the seasons, although he hates shoveling in the winter and isn’t a big fan of mowing in the summer. When they first moved to New Gloucester, they rented while looking for a house to buy. Eventually, in 1977, they saw an ad in the paper – a fully furnished house for sale on 25 acres for $20,000. In reality, there were only a couple pieces of furniture and the house required a significant amount of work. Chris and Peggy spent a year working on it, tearing out, redoing plumbing and wiring, adding insulation, sheet rocking and painting. They moved in in 1978.
With time Chris added a shop (Fine Woodworking featured it in their Tools & Shops 2019 Issue – you can take a tour of it here), garden shed and showroom. In the main house, there are built-ins in every room. They did a significant amount of landscaping, including planting hundreds of daffodils. They rebuilt stone walls and created trails through the woods. The land allows for gardening and Chris’s first love, forestry.
When studying forestry all those years ago Chris remembers being handed a sheet of paper with spaces numbered 1 through 100. Outside the university’s lab were trees labeled with numbers – students had to identify them all. He did well, and to this day he can identify most any tree in any season.
Climate change has changed Maine’s winters, he says. The first winter he and Peggy moved into the house the only heat source they had was a wood stove and the temperature dropped to 44 below zero. The water in the washing machine froze. “We haven’t seen temps like that in the past 30 to 40 years,” he says. They also now have ticks and opossums and cardinals.
Every year he buys a little calendar that he uses to track the daily temperature, first frosts, the birth of a child, the addition of a dog (he’s had three huskies over the years). “It’s not really a diary,” he says, “but every day I write two or three lines of what happened, what we did.”
The house and land, he says, is getting a little more difficult to maintain. With thoughts of retirement on the horizon Chris and Peggy are considering moving to something smaller.
These days Chris sometimes slows down on Friday afternoons, as he and his colleagues did at his first job at the wildlife research center. He still works Monday through Friday, and he’ll occasionally finish up some work on a Saturday, after supper. But he no longer puts in what used to be a solid 60 hours a week. He splits his time between working in the shop and the business side of things – sending out proposals, tracking down hardware, bookkeeping, taxes etc.
Chris enjoys working in the garden, walking, going out to eat with friends, drinking Scotch and listening to music. He has a Bose player in his shop and 4,000 songs on his iPhone. His taste in music is varied – ’60s and ’70s rock, folk music, jazz, classical, dulcimer music (but no opera or hip hop). Peggy is a librarian and they both enjoy reading.
“Bookshelves are all over the house – we have way too many books,” he says. They’re filled with books about woodworking, Shakers and forestry. He typically doesn’t indulge in buying novels – those he gets from the library. He uses his books for research and owns almost every book on Shakers that has ever come out.
Some folks may be surprised to learn that Chris has nine tattoos (you can see a few of them here). They include a butterfly joint, a maple leaf (because he likes working with maple and almost became a Canadian, he says), a white pine silhouette, a dovetail saw, a cross section of black walnut, a No. 5 plane, a black cherry tree, a chisel and, his newest, a Shaker peg (“a wink at my wife,” he says). “That’s it for now, unless the spirit moves me.”
The Herbie Project
In the June 20, 2010, issue of Portland Press Herald,” Bob Keyes wrote an article titled “Herbie’s come down, sadly. Happily, there’s a big upside.” Herbie was considered the biggest American elm in New England, and started growing in Yarmouth in 1793.
“In 2010, the tree was beyond saving, and had to be cut down,” Chris wrote in a September 2016 blog post. “Some of the branches were over 4’ thick, and the trunk was over 10’ long and roughly 7’ at the butt end. I joined the Herbie committee and suggested that we distribute the wood to craftspeople throughout Maine. During the next nine months the branches were cut up, and the trunk was sawn and the boards were kiln dried, and the wood was distributed to woodworkers throughout the state. They made chairs, benches, birds, baseball bats, cabinets, desks, tables, music stands, hundreds of bowls, pens, a coffin, sculptures, cutting boards, and even an electric guitar.”
In November 2010, the items were auctioned off and the Yarmouth Tree Trust netted about $40,000.
According to the Portland Press Herald article, Chris made a music stand, which was debuted at the Maine Festival of American Music: Its Roots and Traditions at the Shaker Meeting House in New Gloucester, hosted by the Portland String Quartet. The article also noted that the tree’s birth year, 1793, coincided with the establishment of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community and its plans for the building of the 1794 Meeting House – which was where the festival’s concert took place.
Looking at Chris’s life as a whole, circles like this become apparent. His love of forestry and trees and woodworking connect in a simple and satisfying way as in the story about Herbie. His love of reading and learning have translated in dozens of articles, books and workshops. He has followed his father’s legacy, but on his own terms. And his philosophy on life, rules, if you will, for good living, are seemingly so simple on the outside, but require a sometimes surprising bit of complexity on the inside (much like Shaker furniture):
“Only let positive people influence you. Try to stick to your values. Leave a little footprint. Be as creative as possible. Honesty and kindness go a long way.”
2020 Covington Mechanicals Classes Now on Sale
Just a reminder that registration opens at 10 a.m. today for January-June 2020 classes (and that a small, non-refundable registration fee ($12 per day) will be collected at signup). Click here to see the list of classes and to register.
I have to turn on the waitlist for each class after it sells out, and will do my best to keep on eye on the site to do that as soon as it becomes necessary – but if a class you want is sold out and the waitlist isn’t yet functional, please check back for it. (There is no charge to join the waitlist.)
If you encounter any problems with the ticketing site, please send an email to covingtonmechanicals@gmail.com (not to the Lost Art Press help desk).
— Fitz