Or part of it, anyway. We consider ourselves lucky to have had so many friends come out on a fair December day and help us raise a couple of bents. It’s important to set our earthfast posts before the ground freezes, and it’s a kick to see that puppy go up.
Marie Pelletier, Peter Follansbee, and Sally Rothemich took outstanding photos and La Bottine Souriante provided the music.
“The essential processes by which the house took shape, so far as we can determine, were perpetuated in the New World with very few modifications…The timbers once felled were shaped with the axe and trimmed with the adz or sawn with the pit saw. Tenons were cut with a hand saw, mortices were made with an auger and squared with a mallet and chisel, and [trenail] holes were bored with the auger. The timbers were used soon after they were felled and were allowed to dry in situ, as is well attested by the character of the wood itself.”
Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725
We’re putting our new timber frame into the ground before everything freezes. These are the first post-holes for The Francis Cooke House at Plimoth Plantation. Early houses in Plimoth Colony didn’t have foundations and were part of a long tradition of earthfast architecture where upright posts and sometimes studs were put directly into the ground. Cooke’s posts will be raised in pairs, connected by a beam. We spent some time before digging to establish precise post-hole location and depth. Moving 3 joined oak timbers–each weighing several hundred pounds–after they’ve been dropped into a hole is nobody’s idea of fun.
How to make a video about digging holes compelling? Start with some decent music…
Mortises and tenons go together like cream and coffee. We poured the java yesterday. Today was a good day to add the dairy. Here’s a short video of tenons being cut on the top of white oak posts for the new Francis Cooke House at Plimoth Plantation. It features the photography of Marie Pelletier and the music of Michael Hedges, title track from the album, Aerial Boundaries.
The details are in the level.
After our near miss with Hurricane Sandy last week, the weather has been mild and calm here at Plimoth Plantation for the past several days. Just right for leveling, plumbing, and squaring a post and beam bent and laying out its joinery. After we set up the beam on a cribbing of pine and fire-damaged former Cooke House parts, we planed a flat on it to make a reference mark. This will allow us to double check our level, even if the timbers are accidentally moved. We are using a sweet and highly functional scrub plane which Peter Follansbee and Mark Atchison made for us last year.
We literally wrap our plane in a napkin 'ere it goes into our tool basket. Swaddled scrub.
As workmanlike as we hew and saw our timbers, such large pieces inevitably have some imperfections as a result of hand-work and seasoning. There’s always room for a little straightedge help.
Averaging out the hewn face with a 6' straightedge. The oak has weathered some, but it's still quite green.
Here’s another way to even out an unevenly hewn or sawn face: Michael sights down the leg of the square to the post bottom to average out hewing’s imperfections before marking square.
Thy square is but a landsman's cross staff. Those knots our rocks! Put the tenon hard to larboard!
Nothing beats a sharp chisel to pare down a few shims to help level timbers.
There's always last minute paring when cutting house frames.
It just so happens that some of our most focused work on the Francis Cooke House frame began on a day when over 2000 deliriously happy school children came to our museum for a visit! We were able to concentrate on our layout because Goodwife Eaton and John Alden answered questions as we pulled our beards and tweaked the frame. Interpreting to our museum guests can be both verbal and visual.
Fundamental concepts of geometry, botany, and physics explained by 17th century interpreters. But it's a lot more fun than it sounds.
Posts were set on top of the beam, and once they were squared and leveled to it, we began to layout tenons and mortises. Dropping a plumbet allows us to transfer the irregularities of the hewn or pit-sawn face of the timber to the tenon’s shoulders as well as the mortise on the underside of the beam.
Long moments of focused intensity are exhausting. Who's up for wiffle ball?
We prick our marks with an awl. No pencils here! Some marks are emphasized with a tail.
3 Faces of Eve(ning): Hewn post on top of pit-sawn beam, marking on planed surface. We love oak!
Our day wound down and so we’ll leave the joint cutting for next time.
Followst thou me. I knowe ye way to Goodman Hopkins his secret ale-house.
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Tuning up to cut a frame…
Our favorite chisels get the oil bath treatment.
…and leveling up a lot with long pine timbers. This will allow us to more accurately layout and mark our oak framing timbers for joining. Hewing and pit-sawing, while time-tested, leave framing timbers which are imperfectly squared. The timbers must therefore be scribed to their individual joints. That is to say, a tenon cut on the end of one post is meant to fit only that single mortise for which it is scribed to fit. It cannot be moved to another mortise and fit properly. While this is a very foreign concept to the modern stick-framer, this traditional method of framing is as much a part of a 17th-century carpenter’s tool kit as his chisel and mallet.
Oak beams on top of pine layout timbers on top of baulks. The pines in the middle are used to create a level plane. They won't become part of the new frame. Posts will be placed on top of the beams and scribed to fit. The baulks at the very bottom are remnants of the former Francis Cooke house frame.
We got down on site first thing this morning, so we could stretch the historical milieu a little and use a couple of spirit levels and tapes.
If anyone asks, it was all period-appropriate levels, doublets with a thousand buttons, and Early Modern English–
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And just because it’s Halloween, Pilgrim Seasoning’s own Kathleen Wall alerted us to a nice little link on witch marks:
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Dan Shaughnessy, longtime sportswriter for The Boston Globe, periodically writes a column full of random sports nuggets and observations called, Picked Up Pieces. It’s a series of pithy vignettes which, taken as a whole, present a larger picture of the local sports and cultural scene. In that spirit, The Riven Word presents its own version of random moments and events which have occupied our figurative desktops recently:
Remember that tinder box our blacksmith Mark used in the fire-making video? It’s a ridiculously simple and practical way to keep fire-making materials like steel, flint, and char-cloth. The box is based on one of several which came up with The Mary Rose:
from Weapons of Warre: The Armaments of the Mary Rose The Archeology of the Mary Rose Volume 3 2011 edited by Alexzandra Hildred
John Wolf—friend to The Riven Word–made a great reproduction of the box and sent along a few photos. It’s made from a single piece of wood, as in the original. John used ash instead of oak, but we think it’ll be just as functional as the mid-16th century version.
Great work and happy fire-making John!
Big plug for our fellow bloggers across the lunch table. They’ve been posting some really interesting write-ups on their interpretive exploits. These are the good folks who bring life into the houses we make, and this is an opportunity for you to see just what goes into making a pilgrim in the 21st century.
See what goeth on behind coifs and brimmed hats:
http://blogs.plimoth.org/pilgrim-blog/
image courtesy of ESPN/Boston
Local pigskin favorites The New England Patriots are playing this country’s version of football in London tomorrow. While it’s no Man-U vs Chelsea, we hope that our mutual ties and interests will compel you to root vociferously for The Pats. Click this link for a primer on NFL football rules. But the short of it is, whenever the St.Louis Rams quarterback breaks huddle on a third and long, cheer as though The Armada was just sunk!! PS: Flying Elvis is the vernacular for the Patriots helmet decal.
Look what our friends from Salicicola dropped off yesterday:
Take that, invasives!
Two hornbeam seedlings and a handful of swamp white oak acorns to plant. It’s part of an informal naturalization project at the museum. Little gifts can mean a lot. Thanks I and A!!!
If you make a rick of wood, be sure to stack the rings either level or leaning a bit inward. Otherwise…
…you may have to pull down part of the rick and re-stack. This message brought to you by, The Woodricke Council.
We stopped in to see old friend Andrew at a restoration project just down the road from Plimoth. This led to a quick but fascinating tour of the original mid-17th century house.
Detail of purlin trench and score marks on oak rafter.
There’s nothing quite like a close inspection of an original frame to fire us up in building our own conjectural reproductions. Seeing tool marks and surveying frames is a direct link to the past for us, and never fails to inspire. Thanks to Elizabeth and John who welcomed us into their house for an impromptu tour yesterday. They have been here for 50 years, and John himself has done some top shelf restoration.
"What are you doing over there besides looking good?" asked a guest of Justin recently.
So friend Justin is back to work after a fortnight of celebrating the birth of his son. Congrats all! Some of the crew don’t quite understand what parent-hood is all about and why Justin might come to work just a wee bit tired. Here’s the educational video we made for them to watch:
Framing timbers having been moved to their lot, Frank and Hester Cooke couldn’t wait to begin setting up house!
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What do you think of when you think of vacation? Sunny climes and fruity drinks? Hiking above the tree line? Lighting votives in an incense-infused space and listening to A LOVE SUPREME by John Coltrane until your vinyl melts? It’s all of it, good.
How about, pit-sawing?
The saw's gullets carried most of the dust down to the pit, to the chagrin of the pit-man.
As you’ve likely guessed, dear reader, the bubble in our spirit level is just a wee-bit off. And in that off-center spirit, we include many of Plimoth Plantation’s former artisans who just can’t get enough of the sweat and dust that is pit-sawing.
Why hit the gym when you can work your cardio AND make scantling for a timber-framed house at the same time?
Old friend Stuart Bolton and his lovely family were up for a visit from the DC-area and via several texts and calls, Stuart made absolutely clear his interest in jumping on the pit.Wait–you’re on vacation amidst some of the most sublime beaches on the east coast during the full flower of summer and you want to go do work in our stinky and dank saw pit? Sure, ok!
Stuart's flawless technique begins and ends with those blindingly white knee socks.
Sawyers work best when they share a similar mental and physical aptitude for the work–their pace, the saw’s angle, their relative height to one another, and a consistency of stroke. If the pit-man is an olympic distance runner and the tiller needs a smoke, they may be somewhat out-of-sync. If the tiller has T-Rex arms and cannot bring the majority of the saw’s teeth through the kerf leaving the pit-man without a full extension, it may lead to early-onset exhaustion
Stuart and Michael, however, proved a sawyers’ match made in heaven–or at least Devon.
Sawdust tastes exactly like it looks.
Oh sure, it was a little awkward in the beginning, getting the saw to start plumb in the end grain of the red oak, a few tentative starts and stops, awkward silences followed by talking over one another…is this going to work? Is there enough set in the saw? Does he even like me? Then, like a cascade of arpeggios coming out of the bell of Trane’s tenor, the work all at once clicked and the two made the saw sing with a long run.
Like traveling on winter roads, a little fishtailing is not unexpected. Turn into the skid!
As in any relationship, however, there are inevitable rough stretches. A small amount of steering was required to keep the saw on line. Stuart and Michael’s almost plumb approach to the work made it easier to twist and “throw” the saw back on course because there’s less steel to drag in the kerf.
We hew the log square before sawing.Plumb lines are scratched onto the grain at each end as reference.
So while Justin and I ran interference, driving the occasional wooden wedge in the kerf behind the saw and documenting the work for posterity, Stuart and Michael sawed on. And on. And while we forgot to count the actual number of strokes in their run, we did mark the start and end points and we kept time.
A nice olympian run. Pit-sawing as Olympic event? Vote?
Sawing an 8×10 & 1/4″ x 16′ red oak into one 7×8 beam and one 3×8 sill.
“Real time” included moving the timber to another position over the pit as the kerf progressed as well as a small rest about halfway through the run.
From the pace of 25.6 square inches of sawing per minute over 50 minutes, we can extrapolate the real time sawing average over an 8 hour work day:
These are very rough estimates, to be sure. There are a host of variables to consider. From E.B. Jupp’s, An Historical Account of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, (London, Pickering and Chatto, 1887), we have a 1655 record of sawyers’ wages (thank you Peter Follansbee):
“for oake by the hundred 2s 8d”
The record gives different wage rates for oak, elm, fir, and deale boards. These are a day’s wages and, presumably, the standard amount of material which 2 sawyers can process in that time. The question is, what is a “hundred”? Is it a measure of board feet (1 foot wide x1 foot long x 1 inch thick)? If this is true, then a sawyer in the period is expected to saw aprox. 34.5 square inches of material per minute, which is somewhat more than our rate.
How sketchy are these estimates? Very sketchy. The Riven Word stands ready to be corrected. And more delving is needed. Just what is “sawing by the hundred” anyway? Regardless, such sawing runs give us valuable insight–not to mention house parts–and, we hope, puts us in the same ballpark as our pit-sawing forefathers.
The characteristic split grain at the end of a kerf. Well done, gentlemen.
These pieces are going into the new Francis Cooke House frame. All in all, it has been a pleasant “vacation”. Outstanding work, Stuart and Michael. And thanks for your time, Mr.Bolton. So while some folks want an umbrella in their glass–others prefer sawdust in their mug.
Into the great wide open.
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Editor’s note: This was the second day of sawing for Stuart and Michael. Two days earlier, The Riven Word caught a streamlined 8-minute run on video in real time.
Watch a pitsawing music video by The Dinghys!
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Thank you for reading!
Pitsawing has very deep roots in the English tradition and is still practiced in parts of the world today. It’s an essential part of our work re-creating the 17th century English village. We make all of our boards for doors, shutters, and floors at the sawpit. We also saw oak scantling for joists, studs, and rafters for our frames.
It’s always a workout at the pit, especially when you’re breaking in a new guy. Sometimes, when the work drags on and the saw needs just a little whetting, maybe it helps to hum along to a song like Froggie.
The video is a musical mashup of Froggie Went a Courtin and our work in the sawpit. It features music from The Dinghys–a local group of several ex-Plant-patriates who are making some great music while having a blast doing it: http://www.thedinghys.webs.com/
We’ll post more about the historic particulars of pitsawing in the future, but for now, enjoy the video!
(Michael and Tom are superhuman, though video speeds may have been tweaked just a wee bit to keep in time with the song…)
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