Master Carpenter Garland Wood and Project Carpenter Matt Sanbury at work on the Virginia House frame in the carpenters yard at Colonial Williamsburg.
The heart hath its reasons, which reason doth not know.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
Good evening dear friends!
I arrived at the Colonial Williamsburg carpenter’s yard this morning with another one of my cockamamie ideas about how we might improve things. We could do this, we could substitute that. It doesn’t matter what. There is always something.
It was early morning and still freezing, but the carpenters were there before me. The yard fire was already going, and carpenters Garland, Matt, and Bobby already at their work.
We adjourned to the saw shed to discuss my idea, such as it was. They listened attentively. Yes, they said, there was this way and that way of doing the same thing. This is why they chose the way they did. I persisted. They remained imperturbably patient. Before long, by fine degrees and friendly persuasion, they imparted to me the wisdom of hands.
After thirty-five years as a tailor, you’d think I would know by now. There are some things only the hands ever know, that only experience teaches. The friendly carpenters never put me in the wrong. They never made themselves right. They simply spoke with the knowledge of years in their hands, the weight of walls on their shoulders, the strength of jointed timbers in their minds.
“Strength is the chief of his Study,” wrote The London Tradesman of the carpenter’s trade in 1747. Buildings stand solid in certain kinds of ways. Roofs yield shelter for certain reasons. The art of knowing those ways and reasons is learned over time, and is never wholly reducible to words or concepts, nor even to figures or plans. Modern engineering may seem to give the lie to that limitation, but modern engineering is better at building bridges than making a home for human nature.
A couple of months ago, Garland Wood was interviewed by Innermost House founding advisor, Rob Yagid, of Fine Homebuilding Magazine. It was an illuminating hour, full of lively interest. You can listen to it here. Garland reflected on his forty-year career at Colonial Williamsburg, and on the satisfactions and challenges of practicing fine craft today. Particularly 18th century woodworking craft, of which he is a master. And most especially here in Williamsburg, which stands as near to the beginning of things as any fully independent American craft tradition can do, poised just at the edge of the modern world.
Garland and his crew have constructed nearly fifty buildings in Williamsburg’s Historic Area over the last four decades, all with materials in use here in the 18th century, all with 18th century tools used in 18th century ways, all entirely by hand.
This is an extraordinary achievement. There are other timber framers, certainly. In the last fifty years their numbers have multiplied across the country. But there are none operating on such a scale who limit themselves entirely to traditional tools and methods. What can be learned from such a rarefied practice?
That question will occupy this journal for much of the coming year. The traditional trade crafts, wherever they may be practiced; the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, the largest and most complete program of its kind in the world; and the Virginia House Project in particular: all these bear messages from the past which are perennially relevant, even necessary, to any truly human future. Our framing experiment seeks to bring into material focus fundamental questions of purpose and meaning. Can human culture survive unsupported by a frame? It is so easy to have cockamamie ideas up here in the clouds, to believe in them, even to allow oneself to be provoked by them. But to what end?
As I took my leave this morning, Garland startled me by mildly observing that he has fifteen working days left at Colonial Williamsburg. Fifteen days after forty years. Garland will still be here in town, and I hope I shall see him often. But when hands like his retire from a lifetime of learning, something in all of us takes a step back from the edges of living knowledge. I do not think our humanity can afford to surrender too much of what only learned hands know of wisdom.
“The heart hath its reasons, which reason doth not know.” The hand has its wisdom, which the head alone cannot conceive. Sometimes I feel I am lunging at the last of a living knowledge before it is wholly lost. I thank heaven there are young people like Matt Sanbury committed to learning from masters like Garland Wood, to knowing the way of things with their hands.
Yours with pleasure,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
D. Lorence: Virginia Frame
Jerry McCoy: Saw House
Garland Wood with 18th c. Level
M. Lorence: Hewing False Plate
QUOTATIONS
”The heart hath its reasons. . .” Blaise Pascal, Pensees