SEVENTY-NINE DAYS: THE CUTTING EDGE

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The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Dear friends,

Seventy-nine days to the end of the year. Somehow that sounds like a lot fewer days than the hundred with which we began three weeks ago. No doubt it is the multiplying number of questions that seem to spring up, Hydra-like, from every question answered.

But there is no peace from questions like the autumn woods. Last week Garland Wood and I visited the land, examined the building site, and scouted for trees. It was a beautiful, warm day in early fall. The ground was already thick with leaves, though the canopy above showed little sign of thinning toward winter. The music of the woods at this time of year is set in a minor key, yet there is an inexpressible lightness of being in that music. "In the woods we return to reason and faith," as Mr. Emerson said.

Garland Wood is an exceptional person who has enjoyed a dream career. He is now just a few months short of concluding an adventure of forty years at Colonial Williamsburg. We here all feel immensely honored that our Virginia House will be the last frame Garland cuts, hews, planes, and raises with his team of historic carpenters.

Garland holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary, but considers that his real education began with his apprenticeship under the legendary woodwright Roy Underhill. Roy was the first master housewright at the Colonial Williamsburg reconstruction, and is the host of the long-running PBS television series, The Woodwright's Shop.

Today Garland trains and leads a crew of three journeyman and two apprentice carpenters in the country's preeminent program of historical reconstruction. All craftspeople in the Historic Trades at CW serve the traditional six or seven-year apprenticeship, with the additional requirement that they produce a summary work of practical scholarship on their special subject. Each craftsperson must be at once an artist, a scholar, and a teacher. More than twenty such trades are practiced at CW, many of them representing practical knowledge preserved nowhere else. It is an inexhaustibly interesting world to inhabit.

I have known Garland for twenty years. All the structures he and his crew have built over those years have been constructed purely in the 18th century manner, employing materials locally available during the period. In the knowledge of his hands is a living link between the days.

Nothing here at Colonial Williamsburg is ever merely built, but that it is made an occasion of engaging with the visiting public. Over the last few years, Garland and his fellow craftspeople have concentrated on rescuing facts from fictions, particularly concerning the role of women and Black craftspeople in the 18th century trades.

It turns out that 18th century Williamsburg is largely the artwork of highly skilled Black hands, both free and enslaved. Women practiced the building trades as well. The master of the leading building business of the middle 18th century was a woman. Our humble Virginia frame house will be built as a demonstration of how modestly most people actually lived in 17th and 18th century Virginia, and may choose to live still.

"The hand is the cutting edge of the mind," observed the historian Jacob Bronowski. You learn things with your hands that open up new paths of knowledge, and preserve that knowledge against prejudgment. It is not so easy to maintain a fantasy life while your roof is leaking, or to support an opinion when your floor is falling in. It is a purpose to which we are committed at Innermost House to preserve the hand in our ideals.

Where woodworkers are, the woods must be. The forest here is mostly about a century old, with older trees in the ravines. The canopy is perhaps a hundred feet high in most parts, principally composed of native oaks, beeches, tulip poplars, and southern yellow pines. The beeches are perhaps the most numerous in the mature forest, giving the woods that haunted feeling of forever-autumn. The tulip trees are particularly striking with their straight-as-an-arrow trunks, reaching heights that make them the tallest hardwood in the Eastern forest. There is also hickory, sycamore, sweetgum, locust, holly, ash and, nearer the water, cedar and cypress.

The stout ground sills of our frame will be of white oak, an exceptionally strong and rot-resistant hardwood. Our posts and beams, joists and rafters will be of shortleaf or loblolly pine. All will be native timber harvested from the land. One is accustomed to thinking of pine as a poor substitute for hardwood, but southern yellow pine has exceptional qualities, especially the heartwood. There are heart pine floors in Williamsburg over 300 years old and still perfectly sound.

Because the 17th century Virginia House was at least partially "earthfast," that is, built on wooden posts driven straight into the ground, our porch posts will be stripped trunks of local black locust, the strongest and most rot resistant tree native to North America. The main structure will stand on brick corner piers, as were used on the Virginia frame as it entered the 18th century.

It is satisfying to think that the last frame Garland will build with Colonial Williamsburg is the first American frame to emerge as independent of English precedent more than 350 years ago. We'll explore much more about what the Virginia House means in the weeks to come,

With pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.