Tool and Symbol: The Success of the Double-Bitted Axe in North America

Hurrah for the axe, the brave, sharp axe, Hurrah for its notes that sing, Through the valley wide, up the mountain side, When it sweeps like a falcon’s wing. And down crashes the pine, with its lordly crest, For the axe hath cleaved through its knotted breast.

Let others sing of the sword and flash Of a forest of dancing spears; But their path is red with the blood of the dead, Whilst behind them a sea of tears. And the maiden shall wait for her lover in vain, For he sleeps where the moon glances cold on the stain.

Not such thy triumph, my brave, sharp axe, On your blade are no stains of sin, With a sweep and a blow, you strike your foe, And up from his grave doth spring The yellow grain, the broad-leaved corn, And my children bless you at early morn.

—Dillon O’Brien, “Song of the Western Pioneers” ¹

The encounter between humankind and forest is an underlying theme of history, and until very recently the axe typically mediated that encounter. Few hand tools have been so fundamental to human endeavor. A simple woodworking tool, created within a technological world not dependent upon science, the axe evolved into an exotic weapon and a potent symbol, even for those pioneers who wished only to slay trees and raise corn. But today the axe is fast fading to memory and museum piece: the chain saw has nearly swept it from the scene, and the forests of the industrialized world are now populated with skilled loggers who rarely swing an axe.

Some historians of technology and students of material culture have begun to focus sharply on things as objects of historical interpretation. ² However, they have rarely dwelled on ordinary hand tools to the extent that might be hoped; certainly few have fastened their attention on the axe, despite (because of?) the fact that this lowly tool participates in a large compass of symbolic meanings and myths: precision work, violence, conquest, pioneering, triumphant glamour, craftsmanship, harvest, heroic strength, and more. Some may yet suppose there is just too little for serious historical picking among the saws, shovels, picks, rakes, axes, pruning hooks, hammers, and the rest of the grab-bag rural arsenal of hand tools, that we need to wait only upon implements more resonant with historical drama, such as the sword, the plow, or the musket. If so, it will be unsurprising that crucial events in axe history have remained unnoticed or garnered little attention, even among historians of logging and the lumber trades. ³ Perhaps the trick is to ask the right question.

In the heyday of the axe, a hundred years ago, the rapid switch by American loggers from the single-bitted to the double-bitted felling axe came as a small revolution in timber-harvesting technology. Within a single generation after the Civil War, tens of thousands of loggers reversed hundreds of years of practice in the New World and more than a thousand years of practice in Europe before that. The double-bitted axe entered the forest by stealth, without even the passport of a patent. The swift success of this tool, limited though it was to the United States and Canada, was a transition largely unheralded at the time, and it has not been analyzed or even described since. Doing so requires that we position ourselves to look carefully over the shoulder, as it were, of the frontier farmer, the pioneer, the blacksmith, the professional logger, the factory craftsman—those who knew their axe with a daily intimacy, and knew very well its potential and its limits.

It is difficult now to appreciate fully how patently ridiculous—not to mention dangerous—a double-bitted axe must have looked to experienced axemen when they faced it for the very first time near the middle of the last century. It came from nowhere and arrived without pedigree. It was weird and exotic. To some it must have seemed stupid, like a hammer with two heads; or monstrous, like...