Early felling axe

[rich pierce]

By shape an 18th century felling axe.  Collected in the Mohawk Valley of NY state.  New handle.

[walks with gun]

    Very nice,  I just picked up a 4lb felling axe like that the other day.  I either have to pick up a proper board or split a dry log and make me a proper straight 18th century handle or two.  Should make a nice addition to camp whether I need  it or not.

[Pukka Bundook]

V nice axe, Rich.  I Like old axes!

I have one that's a "Blocking axe"  by the looks of it.
Can anyone tell me what a blocking axe was used for?  (Only seen a picture of one described as such, but no details).
It's a roman -nosed job, with a thin flat blade & laminated.

Richard.

[Clint]

Rich,
I wonder if this axe was for a specific purpose. So much technology has quietly slipped away in the last 200 years. A couple of years ago I inspected a stack of white oak timbers at Mystic Seaport Museum. The timbers were pulled off the bottom of Boston harbor next to Quincy shipyard where they had been 'stored' for a very long time. At a glance, they looked like black milled 10" by 16"s mabey 16 feet long. Once I got up close it was obvious that the timbers were sided with an ax and finished up with an adz. You could put a framing square on the ends and not see a flaw, but individual axe bites were visible and even the small nicks on the axe blade showed. Despite the hand tool marks, I don't think these pieces of wood were out of square by much more that 1/16" in any dimension.

[rich pierce]

Could be it’s a special purpose axe but it works great for felling hardwood trees. The wide blade Jersey pattern is good on cedar and pine but barely bites on a hardwood. As is often the case this one got used till rounded then got pounded as a wedge. Look at the poll.

Link for axe types: https://cooperstoolmuseum.com/edge-tools/

Couple pix. You can see some long narrow felling axes in there.

[Notchy Bob]

Just looking at it, from the shape and length of the bit, I would have identified that as a turpentine axe.  These are not uncommon in roadside museums and antique shops in north Florida and the Deep South.  They were used in the turpentine industry for making chevron-shaped "catface" cuts in longleaf pine trees for collecting the sap, which was then processed into pine tar, rosin, and turpentine.  This must have been awful work, with the heat and humidity, various reptiles and arachnids populating the forest, and just handling that gooey, sticky sap, but people did it, well into the twentieth century.  They used to collect the sap in specially shaped terra cotta pots.  I well remember seeing shards of these pots, and surviving "catfaced" pines on rambles in the north Florida woods many years ago.  We have an old turpentine axe in the family.

Those products of the piney woods used to be known as "naval stores," and were an important consideration in founding the British colonies in the American southeast.  I think a number of tall, straight pine trunks from Georgia and South Carolina may have been stepped as masts on His Majesty's ships, also.

As a matter of fact, I see a turpentine axe in the upper left corner of the Hults Bruk diagram, for comparison.

Thanks for sharing!

Notchy Bob

[rich pierce]

Notchy, I saw that resemblance. Waay back when in the early to mid 1700s a number of Palatines were helped to immigrate to New York colony to do such naval stores work. The whole thing became a fiasco through many misjudgments and misunderstandings. One possibility is that this axe is from that endeavor. Outside of that I’m not as aware of naval stores production in the northeastern colonies.

[Notchy Bob]

Waay back when in the early to mid 1700s a number of Palatines were helped to immigrate to New York colony to do such naval stores work. The whole thing became a fiasco through many misjudgments and misunderstandings. One possibility is that this axe is from that endeavor. Outside of that I’m not as aware of naval stores production in the northeastern colonies.

Interesting!  I knew production of naval stores was primarily associated with the southern colonies in the new world, but I suppose any place with substantial groves of pine could produce them.  I think the Scandinavian countries produce a lot of that sort of thing... Swedish pine tar is highly regarded.  I wonder if the Palatine immigrants were knowledgeable with regard to naval stores production from experience in their native Germany, or if they received "on the job" training.  I know a great many immigrants were poorly prepared for the work they were expected to do in the New World.



Thanks for your comments!

Notchy Bob

[Belleville]

    Very nice,  I just picked up a 4lb felling axe like that the other day.  I either have to pick up a proper board or split a dry log and make me a proper straight 18th century handle or two.  Should make a nice addition to camp whether I need  it or not.

I have had some success adapting double bit handles for 18thc axes.