And then, we finished re-erecting the timber frame for the coming addition.
I often ponder what the original men who built this frame would have thought if they could somehow know of what we did.
Two hundred years ago those men went into the woods with an axe to fell trees. They squared the logs in the woods with those axes, leaving the waste there, and making the material lighter to move. A team of horses would drag these hewn timbers to a pit saw where one man would stand on top and another would be down in a pit, each taking turns pulling on a saw so that dimensional timbers could be made.
Then master craftsmen would do their joinery magic and assemble a frame that would stand for 200 years, even though she endured decades of neglect.
Their work would not be seen in all those years, covered in plaster on one side and siding on the other. And then, just as the home was about to be lost, some young men came in and once again made use of their seventeenth century workmanship.
I have encountered hand prints left by those men, and pocket change that fell out of their pockets, and once, I found a chisel that had been accidentally left on horizontal beam and was covered over by plasterers, still as sharp as any in my tool box.
I’d like to think that both generations would be appreciative of the other. A brotherhood that spans centuries.
Originally posted 2015-03-10 17:48:10.