The Artisan of Ipswich: Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England (review)

Few historians are in a position to produce the kind of work Robert Tarule offers in The Artisan of Ipswich. In 131 pages, Tarule—a historian as well as an accomplished woodworker—recovers a world of craft skill and knowledge as well as artisanal pride, providing readers with one of the most sensitive treatments of early American artisanry of which I am aware.

Tarule opens his book by explaining how he came to write it. After six years in graduate school studying medieval comparative literature, he left ABD and took a teaching job in Vermont, where—having decided to build a timber-frame house—he gained appreciation for all kinds of practical knowledge. Combining dual passions for the distant past and for hands-on work, he eventually took a curatorial position at Plimoth Plantation, the Massachusetts living history museum that interprets the 1620 separatist colony. Returning to graduate school, he embraced the aim of understanding, in the most intimate and material ways possible, the construction of a single piece of furniture, a joined chest made by Thomas Dennis of early Ipswich, Massachusetts. The result is this stunning meditation on craft skill in seventeenth-century New England.

Tarule's aim is to do justice not simply to the sorts of knowledge historians of our own time and place hope to produce and share, but the sorts of knowledge possessed by craftsmen of this distant time and place, much of which is long since lost. Most literature on early artisans and the goods they made emphasizes the acquisition and deployment of manual skills; Tarule's study understands better than many less-tangible forms of knowledge—both conceptual and sensory—as well. The text recovers beautifully the subtleties that constituted seventeenth-century artisanry—distinctions between wood and timber, how to read growing trees in order to select materials wisely given the project at hand, how to allocate the materials harvested most efficiently, what the craftsman learns from the sound of the wood as it splits under the force of his tools. These are glimpses into craft skill rarely captured in any period trade manual, a rich world that the author's intimate knowledge of joinery makes possible.

The nature of relationships between craft practice and the local environment emerge as well. Tarule's sensitive understanding of the properties of various species of wood, for instance, supports an instructive discussion of the ecological legibility of New England for the English migrants, who had the good fortune to discover there the same white oak from which they had learned to make wheels, houses, and watertight barrels. "Nowhere else in the future English settlements and in the coming British Empire would they find a natural world that was so like their homeland" (p. 28), an observation with significance for understanding the evolution of practice from Old England to New.

In five chapters, Tarule provides an overview of Ipswich, its population, and geography; a primer on the cultivation and harvest of oak; a discussion of Dennis's work in the woods, that is, the intersections of craft, community, and the environment; an introduction to the broader scope of woodworking trades in the early American town; and a close study of the assembly of the chest itself, revealing the conceptual and manual skills that shaped the final product. A final "essay on method and sources," which reflects on insights gleaned from his work at the museum, includes observations about the relationship between artisans and their tools that will be of interest to readers of this journal.

Tarule's book wears its learning lightly. While it is grounded in the scholarly literature, his aim is less to enter a series of historiographical debates than to bring to life one of the early Americans around whom those debates swirl. His discussion of the harvest and sale of oak (activities highly managed and closely monitored by town officials) will be of interest to historians of architecture, commerce...