After a short stint in art school, Sloane, in his twenties, set off cross-country in a Model T Ford, working as an itinerant sign painter. He shunned cities (they already had established sign-painting businesses) and stuck to rural areas and small towns, where he was hired to paint everything from Bull Durham ads on the sides of barns to portraits of farmers’ cows. As he traveled, Sloane drank in sights of local architecture and land- and sky-scapes, which he later rendered in evocative color paintings and instructive black-and-white drawings.
Sloane wrote more than 30 books. In his short illustrated memoir Recollections in Black and White, he called drawing with pen and ink “the most demanding and revealing test of the artist’s ability.” A master of the technique, he could convey incredible amounts of information through his starkly beautiful drawings annotated with his distinctive calligraphy.
Thanks to Sloane’s art, when I look at the post-and-beam frame of our old house here in northern Vermont, I can tell that the original builder used two kinds of axes to hew square beams out of round spruce logs.
First the builder would twang a chalk-line onto a bark-stripped log, then stand on top of the log and use a long-handled felling axe to score deep vertical cuts all along its side. (The log would be held in place with iron “dogs,” staple-shaped devices with two sharp ends that secured it to wooden supports on the ground.) After rough-shaping its sides, the builder would stand on the ground beside the log and employ a chisel-edged broad axe with a short offset handle to remove wood from between the vertical cuts.
The writer John McPhee once wrote that “a single word is worth at least a thousand pictures,” and I generally agree, but I also admit that you really need a good drawing to understand how someone would have squared all four sides of a wooden beam using a couple of axes. Eric Sloane’s depiction of the process is worth at least a thousand words.
Speaking of axes, when remodeling our house I found a rusty axe head tucked in between two foundation stones. At first I thought I’d discovered an ancient tool, maybe even the one used to square our house’s beams. Nope. According to Sloan’s tool book, the axe’s shape suggests it’s not an old design, just a worn-out hunk of iron and steel used hard for various farm tasks.
In A Museum of Early American Tools, Sloane shows how a blacksmith forged an axe head, sandwiching its steel cutting edge, or bit, in a long rectangle of iron heated red-hot and folded over on itself, then hammer-welded to secure the bit in place.
Sloane’s drawings demonstrate how millstones were sharpened and how they ground grain. They accurately depict charcoal hearths, covered bridges, dug wells, wooden water wheels, sleighs, carts, and cooperage (the making of barrels). Methods and devices for levering stumps out of the ground to clear land for planting, and the very different tools, techniques, and structures used to harvest, process, and store hay and crops.
I page through Eric Sloane’s books, both for my own delight and for his exacting images and instructive explanations, useful when I need just the right detail to bring a fictional scene to life.
