  Another section of the Dickinson inventory demands particular attention here: the list of the cabinetmaker’s tools. These were valued by the appraisers at close to £50, and included 81 planes of different sorts, 11 saws, one stock or brace and 20 bits, 63 chisels and gouges, four clamps and a bench vise, a dozen miscellaneous items, and a tool box. A cabinetmaker’s workbench and a variety of woodworking tools of the eighteenth century. Among them may be seen several bench planes, two kinds of frame saw, an assortment of chisels, some measuring and marking tools, a brace and bit, gimlets, etc. This illustration is taken from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, published in London in 1683. No doubt most of these tools were made in England, though the inventory does not say so. Perhaps all of them were. Three years before Dickinson became master of his shop—just about the time he would have been acquiring many of his tools—John Blair, the acting governor of the colony, reported to the Board of Trade in London that:
The inventory does not list hammers, files, or rasps of any kind, which is surprising as they would have been normal and necessary equipment in any woodworking shop—and a number of the latter have been found at the site of the Hay-Dickinson shop. Perhaps the appraisers overlooked them. However, the inventory does not list workbenches or lathes either, which is the more surprising. A workbench is an absolute necessity for cabinet work, a lathe only a little less so, and neither is likely to be overlooked. It may be that the appraisers did not list them as tools because they were deemed to be permanent shop fixtures. At any rate, while we have no proof that Dickinson owned either a bench or a lathe, reason says he would have had at least one of each. Matthew Tuell, a carpenter, owned a wheel lathe and turning tools; and the partnership of Honey & Harrocks owned lathes, did their own turning, and possibly turned for other cabinetmakers. Eighteenth-century lathes were machine tools of a sort but not “power tools” since human muscle provided their motive force. Three varieties can be seen in the reconstructed cabinet shop in Williamsburg: the bow lathe, the treadle lathe, and the great wheel lathe. The last named is the most impressive and the most effective, turning up some 700 rpm on the spindle with a good strong apprentice cranking the large wheel. The power woodworking lathe today is a considerably more complicated machine, but the fundamental principles involved in wood turning have not changed. Similarly, in the other great category of woodworking tools—hand tools—each separate operation is accomplished in precisely the same way by tools that are basically the same as they were in the eighteenth century, or even in the eighteenth century B.C. Turner. A turner, whose treadle lathe spins at different speeds according to which spindle pulley is used for the drive belt. This picture is taken from The Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts, first American edition, published by Jacob Johnson and sold in his bookstores in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1807. Courtesy, Library of Congress. With obvious exceptions, all woodworking tools are intended primarily to remove small amounts of material by some kind of cutting or tearing action. With this simple fact in mind, it is no surprise to learn that saws, planes, chisels, and boring tools found in ancient Egyptian tombs, or depicted by artists of that time, were not significantly different from those of the eighteenth century after Christ. (Examples of furniture made in ancient Egypt, incidentally, still exist, the oldest known articles being stools dating at least from the First Dynasty—3500 B.C.!) Nor should it be surprising to find that the colonial cabinetmaker’s tools, although cruder and less convenient than those sold in a modern hardware store, were fundamentally the same and did the same jobs in the same ways. Furthermore, in the hands of a skilled craftsman the eighteenth-century tools performed their assigned tasks every bit as well as do their twentieth-century counterparts. |
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