I started to collect old tools at garage sales and auctions many years ago because I recognized them as elegant pieces of history that would look nice on a bookshelf. Through experience I realized that many of these tools functioned well and cost less than modern versions. When I was first asked to teach a Historical Construction and Preservation class at the School of Architecture, I thought it would be refreshing to demonstrate how to use them. Soon, my students were enthusiastically learning to feel the process of making in their hands.
Finding tools to use in class then became more than a hobby. It became a quest. My search soon entailed a baffling development. Around 2014, many desirable types of tools that had been nearly impossible to find were becoming available as older collectors sold off their pieces at ever-lower prices. I also sought items that were damaged or had missing parts. Hunting for a traditional adze, an implement with a curved blade perpendicular to its handle used for smoothing and shaping wood, I saw online prices of $120 or more for a complete tool, but only $15 for an adze head alone. As a woodworker, I found carving and then steam-bending the wood to fashion a new handle to be a welcome challenge.
I generally avoid showpiece tools that would be perfect for collectors but diminished by wear. I buy some for classroom show-and-tell — or to give away to people who will appreciate them. And I’ve found wooden-bodied tools that would be perfect for a collector, had the patina not been sanded off to make them look new. In my view, that’s a mistake: It fits my philosophy on antiques and historic buildings that age and wear look better on a tool rather than trying to make it look new. Tools carry a false character if they are made pristine.
I also believe the tools my students and I use are serving their ideal purpose: to educate future architects about the people and material culture of the past. In A Museum of Early American Tools, the author and illustrator Eric Sloane writes that “when you hold an early implement, when you close your hand over the worn wooden handle, you know exactly how it felt to the craftsman whose hand had smoothed it to its rich patina. In that instant you are as close to that craftsman as you can be.”
At Notre Dame, we offer undergraduates a historic preservation concentration and recently launched a Master of Science in Historic Preservation degree under the auspices of the Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability. These students need to understand how to preserve and restore the architecture of the past.
It is also important for all future architects to penetrate beyond the surface of their designs toward a mastery of the underlying construction. Notre Dame architects must learn how to put the parts together to produce buildings that will endure. Our students take multiple courses in construction methods, structural design and environmental systems. Many of these courses include construction demonstrations in class and field trips to construction sites. We host events such as Masonry Day where students work with apprentice masons to build small brick structures. Our furniture design program, led by Professor Robert Brandt, teaches participants how to convert raw wood into finished pieces with an emphasis on form and function.
Modern society often neglects built environments no longer in style. We’ve been so busy with progress that we have let our collective knowledge of craft and traditional construction lapse. Essential knowledge has been lost. Students in my Preservation Workshop see the marks they leave on materials and grasp the limitations of the tools they use to do work. They gain a new respect for the tremendous efforts of our forebears to create the architecture of the past.
We cover early woodcraft, carpentry and joinery — the process of making doors, stairs, cabinets and other interior fittings. Professor Stephen Hartley, our restoration scholar, also works with wood along with Brandt and me, but primarily acquaints students with stone, ornamental plaster, stained glass and other essential crafts.
With axe, adze, drawknife and plane we transform logs into boards, then saw to size, bore holes as needed and shape moldings into the surfaces. These methods serve preservation students well when they repair or replace parts during a restoration. With chisels, planes and saws we make joints that allow us to assemble parts into a whole. By seeing how joints are made, we learn how to disassemble them for repair — or to avoid trying to undo joints that are impossible to take apart because their maker was creating something that would endure.
I cannot overstate the importance of putting antique tools in students’ hands. I see their satisfaction in connecting with a vanished world. I could simply talk about variations in the tool marks I show them on replacement logs in the Log Chapel, but that knowledge is not complete until they wield an axe or adze or pick up a brace and bit to bore a hole. Analyzing how such parts were made is like reading a building’s story.
Crafters get attached to tools. A saying from the old-timers: “The man who dies with the most tools wins.” I am afflicted this way, but antique tools add the bonus of that connection to the past.
Most old tools carry some identifying mark. I can research the name of a tool’s maker or owner through the initials carved or names stamped into the wood. The trade guilds of England compelled one to have such a stamp, which prevented many accusations of theft and, I imagine, a few murders. Tools were a craftsman’s livelihood and loss of the ability to work would threaten him and his family with a trip to the poorhouse.
I, too, have a stamp with my name that I will add to the others on any tool I intend to use. I also have a brand that I apply only to the tools I make or those portions of tools I have reproduced. When I mend an old wooden plane, I use materials and methods that leave clear evidence of the repair. I don’t want to fool anyone.
Occasionally a tool tells a story. One elaborate molding plane I acquired seemed perfect in every way. It was likely purchased at considerable expense by a craftsman for a specific job, or in the hopes of expanding his business, but it appeared never to have been used. I first thought the man had died before he could use it. Then I tried using it and found it didn’t work well at all. It had sat unused on various shelves for 130 years. Since I already had a similar plane, I gifted it to a contractor friend who appreciates old tools but is firmly committed to power tools.
I also bought a large timber saw that could be used to build a barn or cut firewood. It told a sad story. The saw’s auxiliary handle was designed to be used at either end of its lengthy blade — adaptable to a one- or two-person job — but on this piece the auxiliary handle was affixed permanently for use by one person. I realized the owner must have had no prospect of a helper.
Worse was the condition of the saw’s two very different kinds of teeth, each sharpened by a very specific method. I have a romantic notion that the tools I collect are diminished if they are unusable, so I sharpen and repair and tune them to do what they were made for. In this case, it was obvious the sawyer did not know what he was doing, because only one kind of tooth was ever sharpened. The effect would be something like carving a turkey with the back side of a knife. The sharpened teeth were in the middle of the tooth-pattern sequence, thus flattening the intentional curvature of the saw teeth. I had to file down all the teeth by as much as a quarter inch and then reshape and sharpen every tooth. This tedious process took over 20 hours, but I felt I was paying tribute to the poor man and his saw by making things right.
I have become a student of tool history. An outstanding source of early writings and illustrations is Georg Bauer, aka Georgius Agricola, in his 1556 magnum opus, De re metallica, its woodcuts showing every aspect of mining, including tools and constructions.
Later works by André Félibien, Joseph Moxon and Denis Diderot were great observers and communicators of various crafts. In André Jacob Roubo, though, we find an actual woodworker who produced outstanding built and written works in France that inspired our great American architect Thomas Jefferson in the construction of Monticello and other projects.
Farther back, and apart from archeological artifacts and a few fresco and mosaic representations, our best sources are the works of Medieval and Renaissance artists who depicted construction scenes from the Bible. Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and Herod’s Temple are a few Old Testament favorites, but images of the workshop of St. Joseph and the young Jesus became the most popular. Informed by the practices of their contemporaries, these artists left us detailed images of tools and methods, if not of the ancient world, then of their own time.
Some tools are easy to date. I have a worm-eaten molding plane body whose owner carved it with decorations and symbols along with the year — 1847 —, a practice common to many cultures, but especially among the Dutch. Other tools in my collection are undoubtedly over 200 years old. A few could be much older than that. Others pose more of a dating challenge. One hammer is identical to Roman hammerheads you might see in museums, but it also looks like the work of a 19th-century blacksmith. Or it could have been forged by a hobbyist a decade ago.
As a young woodworker, I took to making my own versions of antique tools, so I outfitted my shop with homemade planes for molding and shaping. I still make modern versions of ancient tools for the preservation program. When I tired of bringing tools to class in cardboard boxes and shopping bags, I began making toolboxes of all sorts: a woodsman’s tote for axe, adze and hatchet; a carpenter’s chest for a housebuilder; a Japanese toolbox; a wooden crate for molding planes; a joiner’s chest.
The last is the most elaborate. I started with a northern European design, painted on the outside with a Celtic knot pattern and my name and date in the style of the Book of Kells. The lid I made as a small benchtop with a vise for demonstrations, which I needed before the school created space for the workshop. I decorated the benchtop with images from 19th-century books about tools. Inside is a tool till of holly with laser-burned images of joints. And, since it was traditional for a joiner to make such a showpiece for prospective clients, I embellished the box’s small drawers with geometric parquetry made of decorative woods. Between them I placed a small ornament of the All-Seeing-Eye in ebony, ivory nut, turquoise, silver and satinwood in honor of my grandfather and great-grandfather, who were contractors — and also Freemasons.
I build these toolboxes not just to store and transport tools but to demonstrate to my students various methods of construction. Each one has my name, date and brand in the tradition of craftsmen throughout history.
More than all the courses I teach on structures, environmental systems and building technology, Historical Preservation and Construction brings me the most joy. It is my hope that through this class Notre Dame trains competent stewards of our built history.
Alan DeFrees is the James A. and Louise F. Nolen Professor of the Practice in the School of Architecture at Notre Dame.