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.
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…
Well, another interpretive season is in the books. Time to lose the beards and drop the regional English dialects. Time to exchange our pipkins for coffee cups and our canvas for carhartts.
If we may say it, we finished the year in fine fashion, introducing thousands of museum guests to the unmitigated joy that is Plimoth Plantation’s saw-pit. Each Thanksgiving, we wrap up the year with a bonanza of pit-sawing–it’s our version of Thanksgiving football.
'tis like unto x-box, only different.
Several notable guests took turns joining us in the pit, including Mark’s son, who shows some promise as a pitman. Old friend and former artisan Rick C. happily took a turn below and he didn’t miss a beat. Bob Reimel, who’s runs a portable saw mill and does some amazing work, stopped by because, we assume, he wanted to see some “real” sawing. He had never pit-sawn before, so we convinced him to give it a try. Bob rocked the pit with an unorthodox but effective full-body technique. He even did a little steering on his own accord when we started trending off the line. Very impressive! This man understands sawing and wood-grain in any century and with any saw.
Some enthusiastic young people helped us carry the newly quartered oak away from the saw-pit, much to the delight of their parents. I’ve never seen a 4 x 4 x 8′ walking to its destination with so many shuffling feet. Many hands make light the labor. It was a fitting way to conclude our public season.
Prognosticators say the coming winter will be snowier and more “winter-like” than last, whose mild temperatures led to dandelions in January. Que sera sera–our off-season checklist is extensive, and includes standing up the Cooke house frame in addition to much-needed maintenance of existing houses. Through it all, we’ll keep you posted.
We haven’t said it in a while: Thanks for your readership and support of The Riven Word! Thanks for subscribing and commenting on our posts and for keeping us honest and on-point. It’s a journey of discovery and we’re tickled to have you along for the ride!
It just so happens that our recent daub damage has coincided with a local excavator’s discovery of clay.
Mike Mulligan hello?
Jim Halunen Brush Cutting and Mowing and Cheney Trucking and Materials have been digging a septic pit in the White Horse Beach area of Plymouth, about 10 miles south of Plimoth’s original settlement. To find the right ”percolation rate” they’ve had to dig deep on this particular lot. Several feet down, they came upon a nice deposit of clay. We gratefully received a delivery of several yards of this material yesterday:
Gumby Origin Story.
Well, we love Gumby and Pokey as much as the next guy, but we’re not going to daub our walls with em. For one thing, they’re not found locally.
And their vivid colors might betray their other-worldly origins.
For more than a decade, we’ve been mixing mortar from clay which came from the bottom of Boston Harbor during The Big Dig. It’s called Boston Blue clay, and it’s a medium shade of gray in color, with a slight tinge of blue in places. The mortar made out of this clay seasons to a light gray color. Because the clay is very pure and “plastic”, it needs a fair amount of earth and binder in the mix to be useful as a mortar for our walls and chimneys. Unlike the vivid green and orange of Gumby and Pokey, the overall effect in our houses’ interior is a light gray color. Call it, Pilgrim Humours, if you’re looking for the correct shade at the paint store.
The White Horse Beach clay is much browner in hue, almost ruddy in places, with some flecks of gray.
It's so exfoliating!
It’s also more local and perhaps closer to what might have been used in pilgrim walls as a mortar. The primary sources speak of digging clay out of the side of Town Brook which we think is closer in appearance to the brown and ruddy color than the Boston Blue variety. We also have some anecdotal evidence of deposits of brown-colored clay in earthen basements of houses in downtown Plymouth today.
The overall appearance of the interior of our houses will subtly change over time, as we work more of the new clay into our walls and chimneys. We’ll also need to adapt our mortar recipes to this clay, which feels more silty and “crumbly” than the more dense Boston Harbor clay. We may need more binders like dung and straw, and less earth in the mix.
"Trodding Mortar" anagrams: Grand Dirt Motor and Daring Do Mr Trot!
Come the summer, we’ll be all feet on deck daubing The Francis Cooke House. We’ll use mostly mortar which has been reclaimed from the former house’s walls, but we’ll also be mixing in some of the new clay. It’s an opportunity to experiment with different varieties of clay mortar in the same house. If you’re local, come on in the mortar’s fine!
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Co-worker Eva Lipton remains in our hearts and thoughts and prayers as we approach Thanksgiving. Team Eva has set up a wonderful series of events and support pages for Eva and her family on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Team-EVA/223963567711425?fref=ts
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:
k
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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Harry Hornblower and friends groundbreaking, 1958.
Deep down in the annex of Plimoth Plantation’s Visual Arts Department, there’s a small, fluorescent-saturated room, buzzing with climate control and filled with negatives, slides, and prints. The visual archives at Plimoth Plantation reveal a rich history of our 65-yr-old institution. There you will find old friends, legends you have never met, and younger versions of one’s own self. There are slides and negatives recording construction techniques and methods used at the very inception of our museum. It’s humbling, daunting, and energizing–all at once–to have a look through all those folders and file cabinets: Where did we come from? How did we get here? My god, what have I done!
After 65 years it’s acceptable to contemplate one’s own institutional navel. The key is to look at the records without passing judgement and to consider that what may initially seem quaint or inefficient or historically inaccurate, was once a first, and was part of a pioneering way of seeing history. There are many “firsts” recorded on film in our archives, and for that alone we are grateful. Humility goes a long way down here, knowing that one day our work and methods and hairstyles will look just as dated to someone looking back at the records we leave behind in some future annex.
As a primer to our forthcoming posts on house-frame construction,The Riven Word takes a little journey in the way-back machine to better understand our own museum’s history of colonial-house construction, even as we try to rediscover the 17th-century while moving into the 21st.
Processing timber for a frame has always involved hand-work. Once it was common to surface squared mill-sawn stock, to give it a hand-wrought appearance.
We still work the house timbers, though our methods have changed.
Justin finding the square in that white oak.
Sometimes the work seeems strangely familiar…
"Daubing" a chimney.
…even if the faces are different…
Mark putting finishing touches on his forge chimney, circa 2001.
…and the techniques have changed. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we’d like to think that we are that much closer to discovering historical truths.
Paula Marcoux daubing a hearth wall at Standish House, circa 1994.
We used to do much good work behind the scenes, out of view of our guests…
Rob Tarule and Joel Pontz's excellent adventure, circa 1987.
…and that had a purpose in allowing us the time and concentration necessary to re-discover ancient techniques.
As we laid the groundwork of understanding and appropriate methods, we became more confident in sharing our labors with museum guests.
The Myles Standish house-raising, 1993. All of the house's elements were, for the first time in our museum's history, worked by hand before our guests.
Methods of construction once involved a hybrid of modern materials and historic interpretations.
Cattail heads lopped.
These days, it’s off to the marshes–
Into the blue again.
And into the sawpit–
This is not my beautiful house...
…to gather and to make our building materials.
Specific details come and go–water dissolving and water removing…
Thatching pre-Peter Slevin--a brave new world.
…but from space, or from the bottom of the ocean, it all looks about the same.
Working Winslow's cap, 2012.
Through the decades, work here has always been done in earnest, taking advantage of the latest research and understanding.
Nails, saw, square, hammer--it all looks familiar. Where's the drill though?
Tweaking the methods, though, will sometimes turn things on their head. This is to be expected.
Stuart Bolton riving clapboards for forge walls and roof--2000.The forge was the first large-scale "cratchet" frame attempted.
Fashion is a fickle mistress.
Francis Eaton House, 1970--Nashoba Project school collaboration.
But work and discovery remain a constant–water flowing underground…
Winslow House parlor addition, 2001
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Où peut-on acheter chaudrée?
This post is made possible by the institutional memories and sublime photographry of great people like:
Thanks for your part in keeping history alive and relevant.
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