Have Broadax-Will Time Travel

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PLOWBOY: What was going through your head then?

UNDERHILL: I just kept talking, praying that Geary, the director, wouldn't become alarmed enough to quit shooting. He saw that I was OK and kept the cameras rolling. Afterwards, when the staff was reviewing the tape to see what we'd got, the sliced-open finger was the biggest attraction. I'm glad they taped it because I think that lots of viewers remembered the show where some guy cut himself and bled on TV, and those people tuned back in, probably to see what other damage I could do to myself. Seriously, though, the show most likely worked in our favor, because it added some realism and credibility.

PLOWBOY: Have there been other near misses on the show?

UNDERHILL: There was the log cabin disaster . . . well, maybe not a disaster, just a mishap. On that show, I'd finished constructing the perfect cabin joint and I said, "Well, we've got a few seconds left, folks, so I'll trim this up and show you how tight I can get it." I made a wrong swing with the ax, and—pop!—broke the whole joint off. We had only one cabin ready, so we couldn't film it again. I stood there a few seconds looking at what I'd done, then said, "Well, that's it, see you again next week."

PLOWBOY: You mentioned before that it seems as if you're constantly traveling between centuries. You must really feel like a time traveler when you leave Williamsburg to tape your TV show.

UNDERHILL: Sometimes. However, the feature that I think makes the show interesting to me—and something that I try always to incorporate—is that "The Woodwright's Shop" could be out of the past or it could be in the future; it could be either one. And it's now, too. There's a tremendous overlap between history and appropriate technology, and I try not to separate the two. The history of appropriate technology is the history of human development, and vice versa. They're totally interlinked, at least during the phase of history I'm into.

PLOWBOY: How do your books fit into all of this?

UNDERHILL: I use the books as a way to tie up the loose ends that may have been left dangling from the series. In the books I can explain other methods of building a particular project—variations that will accomplish the same thing. In the series and the books, I've tried to begin with wood and basic implements and to add some new tools and different woodworking techniques as we go along. The first book, you may remember, started with a few people with access to some trees and went from there. Those folks had the potential to build a house.

PLOWBOY: When you were teaching workshops, you had pupils. Now you have fans. How have you dealt with your growing public recognition?

UNDERHILL: I get lots of mail. Most of it's just pleasant: Someone likes the show and sits down to write. That makes me feel good because "The Woodwright's Shop" is the kind of show I'd like to see on TV and that's what I'm keeping in mind when I do it. Lots of other people write wanting to know where they can get more information on woodworking or where they can find tools. I even got a letter from a man in San Quentin Prison who asked me to please send him a drawknife and a file. I suppose he has trouble getting good tools!

Some people will send me pictures of things they've made, inspired by what they've seen on the show. Others tell me about old woodworking tools and send me photos. And some will send me pictures of machines they've designed and tell me about their experiences. And such letters are, of course, the greatest rewards that I could possibly ask for. Something on the show worked, and the people who saw it knew they could do the same sort of thing!

The letters I like best, though, are those that add to our historical knowledge of woodworking, which—you must bear in mind—is very imprecise. Other times, people will share interesting tool-related stories when stopping by the Carpenter's Yard at Williamsburg. This one man, with a very thick European accent, was looking at the pit saw, which is a setup where a large log is sawed into boards by two workers using a crosscut saw; one person is on top of the log, and the other works down in the pit. This fellow had worked with a pit saw in a labor camp in Poland during World War II. He said they ate lichen off the logs in order to survive, and many of them died.

PLOWBOY: You say our historic knowledge of woodworking and other common crafts is incomplete. In what ways?

UNDERHILL: I think that we have an overly romantic view of anyone who does anything by hand. That's one reason, of course, for the current popularity of handicrafts. Objects made by hand that have survived from several hundred years ago are regarded as masterpieces.

But I can show you one tool in my collection that survived intact because it didn't work at all. It's a scorp for hollowing out the inside of a wooden bowl. It's hard to handle and gets in the way when you actually shart shaping the bowl. This tool is still around today, in mint condition, simply because nobody could use it.

Basically, the men and women who were creating objects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Williamsburg or anywhere else weren't producing masterpieces. They were in their business to earn a living. Their craft was their survival. In most cases, people didn't choose an occupation because of some deep love for the craft, though their surviving work does reflect care and attention.

Also, museums collect and exhibit what might be considered the best craftwork of past ages. Fine objects tend to survive. We know very little, for instance, about harnesses, or barrels and other staved objects, or pottery and earthenware. Items subjected to everyday use wore out. In most cases, we can't say that a handmade barrel was definitely crafted in 1750 or 1775 or even 1830. However, we can notice differences in barrels made before and after the introduction of machinery for manufacturing these objects.

Finally, the surviving sources we do have concerning seventeenthand eighteenth-century crafts detail what we call the fine trades. There is little evidence remaining about crude extractive processes such as logging, tar burning, pit sawing, or burning oyster shells for mortar making. We simply don't know much. In our work at Williamsburg, we're sometimes able to figure out pieces of the puzzle by re-creating these trades.

PLOWBOY: When you say surviving sources on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trades, I assume you're referring to books. In what ways are these resources flawed or misleading?

UNDERHILL: Sometimes when you read a book about a specific trade, there'll be pieces of the process left unexplained . . . or maybe you'll misinterpret what has been written. Then you'll start actually making the object, and the author's failing or your own becomes obvious.

We often tend to explain material culture in the light of our own field of expertise. We'll say that a long-ago craftsman constructed a wall in a certain way because of the prevailing cultural patterns. Often this will turn out to be true; other times, it'll simply be that he found out that if he didn't construct a wall in that manner it would fall down.

It's hard to make generalizations about the craftwork of the past. Even today we can't answer the questions "How long does it take to build a house? How many workers?" The questions are too generalized to answer. There are random influences on any project—the local economy, the raw materials available, the skill of the laborers, and the talents of the designer—past or present.

I sometimes fear that one of the negative aspects of "The Woodwright's Shop," and of my books, is that I may be helping people to make generalizations about the past. I'll say something on the show, and people will take it as fact instead of challenging it and researching it.

PLOWBOY: What exactly do you mean?

UNDERHILL: A specific example would be regional variations in methods of working with wood and even in the names of the tools used. For example, that bench over there is called a schnitzel bank by the Pennsylvania Dutch. If you were English, you'd refer to it as a drawbreak. For simplicity's sake, I may refer to a tool used on the show by its most commonly used name. I have this moral dilemma whether to do this on the show, for fear that the other names may be lost in the future.

PLOWBOY: Considering the array of power tools on the market, are you ever tempted to update your approach to woodworking?

UNDERHILL: I'll admit that it's sometimes difficult to divorce myself from contemporary knowledge when re-creating the past. Say, for instance, I'm working in the Carpenter's Yard and we're constructing a joint. Nowadays, we know that if you construct a joint in a certain way it will bear a specific load. We have reliable stress tables that give us this information. But we can't use those sources. We have to build the joint the way it was done at a certain time in a certain town, even though we know this may not be the best way to do it.

These difficulties aside, though, I'm never really tempted to put my work—or the show—in a more modern context. At some point, I made the decision to present my craft just the way it was, in its classical form. I serve my purposes better if I leave the updating to others. Classical woodworking is not the kind of technology that comes and goes; it never becomes dated, or changes and becomes obsolete. It will always be there as long as there are trees and metal and muscles.

Furthermore, historic craftwork—without the so-called modern improvements—is really quite sophisticated. Using a hand tool, you can often accomplish a task in one-tenth the time it would take using a seemingly superior modern tool or technique. Consider the ax. It's phenomenal, just amazing, what you can do with an ax.

PLOWBOY: To what do you attribute the growing interest in hand work and natural materials?

UNDERHILL: I think it's a reaction to synthetic materials. The more we use synthetics, the more we come to value traditional materials. Wood and hand tools have now become almost luxury items.

PLOWBOY: Are there any specific books that you think would be especially helpful to either beginning or advanced woodworkers?

UNDERHILL: I always recommend the classics. A lot of good resources are, of course, being added to the field, but the great references are Henry C. Mercer's Ancient Carpenter's Tools, and Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises; or, The Doctrine of Handiworks as Applied to the Arts of Smithing, joinery, Carpentry, Blacksmithing, and Bricklaying. Particularly good is the chapter in the back on sundial repair.

PLOWBOY: Sundial repair?

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