Tooling Around the Matheson History Museum
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The Cooper's Craft

6/23/2015

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19th Century German Cooperage. Image by Anonymous artist, via Wikimedia Commons.
By Donald Albury

The Cooper's Craft

I will be exploring the cooper's tools in the Tison Tool Barn collection in a series of posts. In this post I will provide some background on the cooper's craft, which I hope will make my explanations in the next two posts of how those tools were used a little easier to understand.
A cooper is a traditional craftsman who makes round containers assembled from wooden staves and bound with hoops, with one or both ends sealed by flat ends or heads. Containers made by coopers include casks and what is often called “white cooperage”, such as buckets, tubs, vats, water tanks, and butter churns. Casks (often called barrels, although a barrel is just one size of cask) bulge in the middle, with curved staves, and have both ends closed when they are full. Buckets, tubs, churns and such have straight staves, and are closed on only one end.
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Wood bucket in the Matheson History Museum. Photo by Donald Albury.
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Various Buckets, Tubs and Butter Churns. Photo by Pleple2000, via Wikimedia Commons.
Casks are made in many sizes besides barrels. Traditionally, a barrel is a size of cask which holds between 25 and 50 gallons. The size of a barrel (or any other cask) depends on what it was used for and where and when it was made; English and French wine barrels, ale barrels, beer barrels, and whiskey barrels all have had different capacities. The sizes of various ale and beer casks in England were changed several times by Act of Parliament. The gallon with which cask capacity was measured also has varied by type: wine gallon (on which the U. S. liquid gallon is based), ale or beer gallon, corn gallon (a dry measure), and imperial gallon. Modern cask sizes are often measured in liters.
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Traditional English Wine Cask Sizes. Image by Grolltech, via Wikimedia Commons.
The above illustration shows traditional (before 1824) English wine casks in descending order of size. A wine tun held 262 wine gallons (a tun would therefore hold about a ton of wine). Traditional English beer casks were, in descending order, called tuns, butts, hogsheads, barrels, kilderkins, firkins, and pins. A beer tun held 218 ale gallons, while a beer pin held 4 ½ ale gallons. The wine gallon equals the U. S. liquid gallon, while the ale gallon was a little larger than the British imperial gallon, so a beer tun was approximately the same size as a wine tun.
Almost anything could be stored and shipped in a cask: flour, seeds, fruit (the apple barrel in Treasure Island), vegetables, crackers (hardtack), pickles (famously sold out of barrels in country stores), salt pork and beef (in brine), oil (whale oil, and later, petroleum), water, wine, beer, or liquor. Gunpowder and heavy items such as nails or other hardware were shipped in smaller casks called kegs. Liquids such as wine were often stored in larger casks. Almost all the food, and all of the water, on sailing ships was stored in barrels. While they have largely been replaced by cardboard, glass, plastic, and metal containers, wooden casks are still used today for aging beer, wine, and liquor.
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Five Gallon Coca-Cola® Syrup Keg at the Matheson History Museum. Photo by Donald Albury.
Casks are easy to store and move. A cask is stable when standing on end. When the head is knocked out of the cask bulk contents can be easily reached. Liquids can be dispensed in small quantities from a cask using a tap. An unopened cask can be turned on its side, and rolled. A cask is easier than a similar sized box to lift onto a ship in a sling or move into a cellar.
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Detail from 17th century illustration showing a wine barrel being hoisted by a crane. Image by Wenceslaus Hollar, via Wikimedia Commons
Casks have been made and used for at least 2,000 years. Coopering, the making of casks, developed into a sophisticated technology. Until the 19th century, coopering was a demanding manual craft. It required extensive skills, acquired through years of apprenticeship, and a number of specialized tools. Factories using machinery took over most the coopering trade in the 19th century. Wooden casks and "white-cooperage" goods are seldom used now, but some casks used for aging whiskey and high-end wine and beer are still made by craftsmen using hand tools. The Tison Tool Barn has examples of some of the specialized hand tools used by coopers. Next week I will describe some of the tools used by coopers to shape staves.
Disclaimer: I did not know anything about coopering until I became curious about the cooper's tools in the Tison Tool Barn. I have researched the subject on the Internet and found tantalizing hints, speculation, contradictions, blurry images of old books, and what I hope is relatively reliable, if incomplete, information. I have tried to hold my own speculation in check. Some sources I consulted for this post are:

'Cooper (profession)', at Wikipedia
'Barrel', at Wikipedia
The Cooper (Bedford County)
Eighteenth Century French Coopers
Making Wooden Buckets

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All photographs by Donald Albury in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Up and Down and Up Again

6/17/2015

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An Introduction to the Tison Tool Barn
The Matheson History Museum holds a number of old tools and related objects. Approximately 1,000 of these tools and related objects are housed in the Tison Tool Barn, a component of the Matheson History Museum.

John Mason Tison, Jr. was a native of Gainesville, and an electrician. He was also a member of the Gainesville Sunshine Clowns. In his persona as Dilly-Dally he helped entertain children in hospitals.
                                John Mason Tison                                                                       Dilly-Dally
             Photo courtesy of  Matheson History Museum                                  Photo courtesy of  Matheson History Museum
John Tison collected old tools for twenty years, and in 1993 built a barn in his backyard to house his collection and his workshop. Mr. Tison ordered the parts for the barn from a company in North Carolina, cut to his specifications (in effect, a custom kit), and assembled the barn largely by himself. The frame of the barn is post-and-beam or timber framing, consisting of large square timbers joined by mortise and tenon joints, secured by wooden pegs. No nails, bolts or other metal parts are used in the frame. The barn has a rustic front porch and a second floor under a high-pitched roof.
                             The Tison Tool Barn                                  The post-and-beam frame of the Tison Tool Barn
                              Photo by Donald Albury                                         Photo courtesy of the Matheson History Museum

Before his death in 1995, John Tison donated the barn and his collection of approximately 500 old tools to the Matheson Museum. Although Mr. Tison's residence was less than two miles from the Matheson Museum, it could not be moved over city streets. In 1997 the Matheson Museum Board contracted with Geoffrey A. O'Meara to dis-assemble the barn and move the components. O'Meara and his crew carefully labeled each piece of the barn as it was taken down. They re-erected the barn adjacent to the Matheson House (behind the main Museum building) in 1998. Since then, another 500 old tools and other historical artifacts have been added to the collection.

The Tison Tool Barn holds hand tools used in a number of occupations, including farming, forestry, navel stores (turpentine) collection, blacksmithing, carpentry and joinery, coopering, metal working, mechanics and electrical wiring. The barn also includes a display assembled by John Tison of the old knob-and-tube electrical wiring system used in the United States from the 1880s until the 1930s.

               The east bay of the Tison Tool Barn                             Display of knob-and-tube wiring elements
                          Photo by Donald Albury                                                        Photo by Donald Albury
The Tison Tool Barn is generally open by appointment, depending on the availability of staff to conduct tours. The Tool Barn may also be open during some events at the Museum. Please call the Museum office at (353) 378-2280 to arrange a tour, or to inquire whether the Tool Barn will be open during an event.

Creative Commons License
All photographs by Donald Albury in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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    Author

    I have been a volunteer at the Matheson History Museum. Feeling an affinity with old hand tools (some of which I remember from my youth), I have tried to learn more about the history of the tools in the Tison Tool Barn, and how they were used.

    I am not an expert on tools. I have used some of the tools represented in the Tison Tool Barn, though perhaps not very well. I do enjoy digging around to find out more about the tools, and hope that some of you share my interest in the old tools collected in the Tison Tool Barn.

    This is my personal blog. Any claims, suppositions or opinions offered here are mine, and do not necessarily represent those of the Matheson History Museum, its staff or its Board of Directors.

    All text and photographs by Donald Albury in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All illustrations taken from Wikimedia Commons are either in the public domain, or have been released under a Creative Commons license.

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    Interesting Sites about Old Tools

    • Collectors Weekly: Tools and Hardware
    • A Woodworker's Musings
    • Walsh, Peter C., Woodworking Tools 1600-1900, Smithsonian Institution. The e-book version is downloadable for free from Project Gutenberg.
    • Directory of American Tool and Machinery Patents
    • Alloy Artifacts - 20th century hand tools
    • Wheels that Won the West - About wagons, which are a type of tool
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