Eric Sloane

Sloane wrote histories of Americana (especially New England) in the 50s and 60s. Old tools, old barns - wood, and weather, and folk wisdom. It looks like about forty books. He was also a painter and illustrator, and was married seven times.  Does that make him more American, or less?

My wife took four of them out for from the public library.  I browsed them and learned something from each.  The soil was wetter in the old days, did you know that?  At least, it was in New England and along the Eastern seaboard. Lands had not been drained and reclaimed so much. The moss, and duff, and topsoil absorbed water rather than allowing it to run off. Very little was paved. People wore boots more, because they walked over the varied terrain, doing chores before going to their jobs as barbers or cooks. It's why corduroy roads, which would make us crazy to deal with now, were common. Otherwise, you were badly stuck.

Did you know there were both dry coopers and wet coopers, as in "dry goods" and "liquids," but also white coopers, who did not bend wood but made buckets and such, and general coopers who worked in shipping and on the docks. Not to mention hoopers, who made those hoops that held the barrels and casks together.  I never knew that.

He throws in old anecdotes, such as how a man "from the city" - always be suspicious that an embellished tale is about to be told when you see that (Heck. Done it m'self) - used metal tins from up in his new-bought Vermont barn that were designed to transport FINE VARNISH ended up varnishing his floorboards with maple syrup.

Yet I was not tempted after my browsing to read the books cover-to-cover. There is too much sighing and sermonising about how much better things were built in the Good Olde Days, and how that was good for our character. I don't mind that terribly as a general outlook on life, craftsmanship, self-reliance, etc.  But literally everything he mentions about our ancestors' character and habits was superior. It is considered a plus in his mind that people largely made their own tools, or at least the handles, so that each was "an extension of a man's hand." He notices the little details on the backs and undersides of Early American axes (13 types), and adzes (6 types), and what slight advantage for a task each was. But now, he laments, the aim of mass production is to make a tool that gets a job done as quickly as possible. Huh. Ya see, I kind of like that approach myself, and I am betting that Elias Winthrop or Jonathan Deering in 1843 might like that better, too.  They weren't romanticising these jobs.  The sun sets about 4:15 these days, and the temperature is going down.  Any sensible person wants to stop using sharp instruments by that time. 

I think many people are capable of ignoring such irritations and just enjoying the learning.  Mike and Bethany, Dan King might be one of them. But I am not one of those.