The Whetstone Quarry

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Excerpted from The Woodwright's Companion: Exploring Traditional Woodcraft by Roy Underhill. Copyright© 1983 by The University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Roy Underhill is familiar to many television viewers as "The Woodwright" . . . a down-to-earth fellow, distinguished by a pair of snappy red suspenders, who—once a week—departs the big city, saunters down a bustling highway, strolls across a traintrestle, and unlocks the door to his nineteenth century carpenter's shop (see opposite page). For the next 30 minutes, Roy invites viewers to share his knowledge of hand-tool woodworking ... or to learn—as Roy puts it—"how to start with a tree and an axe and make one thing after another until you have a house and everything in it".

In real life—that is, aside from being the host of the Emmy A wardnominated television series, The Woodwright's Shop, which is broadcast nationwide by PBS—Underhill is the master housewright at Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg, and author of two books, both of which complement his television series: The Woodwright's Shop and (this year) The Woodwright's Companion. MOTHER is happy to present a chapter from the latter, in which The Woodwright takes us on afield trip to a long-abandoned whetstone quarry near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Roy Underhill

We made our first serious attempt to locate the old whetstone quarry on a day so hot you'd break a sweat just buttering your cornbread. We made several stops along the road where it should have been, but no one we spoke to had seen anything that looked like a mine or quarry. One man said that he had encountered some deep holes off to the west while hunting, but our triangulations on a modern map placed the quarry to the east, so we decided to head on up the ridge and have a look about.

We walked up a cleared right-of-way through the trees, where horses had gone before. There were patches of poison ivy all about, and the occasional kamikaze deerfly went berserk in the presence of its first victim of the season. As we neared a second ridge, the deerflies broke off their attack, and I could see on the crest boulders about the size of bushel baskets that had been exposed in cutting through the narrow right-of-way.

The big rocks looked promising, but only slowly did the old workings begin to reveal themselves. I first spotted the remains of an old road intersecting the path. It was all but paved solid with angular, blue-gray stone rubble. We pushed through the arched brush over the old path, and immediately to our left we could see about quarter-acre of rubble of all sizes partially covered with leaf humus. The rock was fine and dark, and I went excitedly from rock to rock, handing them to Tom. "Try this one," I'd say. He would take it in his hand, test it between his fingers, and proclaim it "greasy," as though this were the highest level attainable in the mineral kingdom. We stopped our excavations long enough to make a quick foray down the old ridge road in either direction to assure ourselves that this was indeed the main workings. Apparently, this rubble pile on the ridge was it.