Books: Popular Science, 1805

DIARY OF AN EARLY AMERICAN BOY (108 pp.)—Eric Sloane—Wilfred Funk ($6.50).

In an old New England house, Author Eric Sloane found a wood-backed, leather-bound diary written in 1805 by a 15-year-old boy. Its entries were terse: "June 3—Helped Father build rope hoist to move the water wheel." or "June 26—Father and I sledded the oaks from the woodlot and put them down near the mill." A student of Early American craftsmanship and the author of volumes like The Seasons of America Past and American Barns and Covered Bridges. Sloane took the diary and dressed it out with verbal and graphic sketches, detailing the construction of a whole backwoods farm. Mere antiquity is not what interests him. Instead, he puts a shine and an edge on the tools of the pioneers, constantly admiring the care and skill of craftsmen who thought enough of themselves, their work, and the times they lived in to date and sign everything they made.

Sloane shows how to build a house without a nail in it that will go up and stay up for hundreds of years, how to make a bottle-glass window, a fieldstone grike, a folding ladder, a wooden tub, a cider press. Two ways to stack cordwood. A recipe for brown ink ("Boiled down walnut or butternut hulls that have been mashed first. Add vinegar and salt to boiling water to 'set' "). From king posts to roofing, Author Sloane details the construction of a covered bridge, which was an 1805 innovation. George Washington never saw one.

Ten & No More. The mill wheel was the all-purpose appliance that could run saws, pump bellows, grind grain, keep trip hammers thumping, turn meat spits and rock babies, all at once. Woods were selected according to capability, and when a wagon was built—oak frame, elm sides and floor, ash spokes and shafts, pine seat, hickory slats—it lasted about twelve times as long as a Cadillac.

Even without its fine studies of bygone craftsmanship, Sloane's book would be of value for its intimate picture of the life of American country people at the turn of the 19th century. Young boys, like the one whose diary he follows, would get up on winter mornings, run across the road to the barn, push the cow or ox aside, then stand and dress in the warm area where the animal had been sleeping. If a house had more than ten panes of glass, the owner paid a glass tax—so most houses had ten and no more. Window glass, in fact, was so valuable that a family often took the panes with them when they moved from one house to another.

Tolls & Tabulations. If a man had a bridge on his land, he charged neighbors and strangers a toll to cross it.* When a woman died, the church bell tolled six times. A man was worth nine. Then, after a pause, the exact age of the late member of the congregation was tintintabulated for all to note.

In a time when two-car garages have phony little haylofts and many a cocktail is supported by a specially crafted cobbler's bench, the ways of the early Americans are more often exploited than understood. Eric Sloane understands them. He says that when he closes his hand around the handle of an old wooden tool, he can all but feel "the very hand that wore it smooth." He succeeds in handing the tool to his reader.