United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
In the shaping of heavy and large vessels such as salt-mortars, pig
troughs, maple-sap troughs, the jack-knife was abandoned and the methods
of the Indians adopted. These vessels were burnt and scraped out of a
single log, and thus had a weighty stability and permanence. Wooden
bread troughs were also made from a single piece of wood. These were
oblong, trencher-shaped bowls about eighteen inches long; across the
trough ran lengthwise a stick or rod on which rested the sieve, searse,
or temse, when flour was sifted into the trough. The saying "set the
Thames (or temse) on fire," meant that hard work and active friction
would set the wooden temse on fire.
Sometimes the mould for an ox-bow was dug out of a log of wood. Oftener
a plank of wood was cut into the desired shape as a frame or mould, and
fastened to a heavy backboard. The ox-bow was steamed, placed in the
bow-mould, pinned in, and then carefully seasoned.
The boys whittled cheese-ladders, cheese-hoops, and red-cherry
butter-paddles for their mothers' dairy; also many parts of
cheese-presses and churns. To the toys enumerated by Rev. Mr. Pierpont,
they added box-traps and "figure 4" traps of various sizes for catching
vari-sized animals.
Many farm implements other than those already named were made, and many
portions of tools and implements; among them were shovels,
swingling-knives, sled-neaps, stanchions, handles for spades and
bill-hooks, rake-stales, fork-stales, flails. A group of old farm
implements from Memorial Hall, at Deerfield, is here given. The
handleless scythe-snathe is said to have come over on the _Mayflower_.
The making of flails was an important and useful work. Many were broken
and worn out during a great threshing. Both parts, the staff or handle,
and the swingle or swiple, were carefully shaped from well-chosen wood,
to be joined together later by an eelskin or leather strap.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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