The fourth member of the quartet of early craftsmen vital to the success of any frontier settlement in the Ohio Country was the cooper. A profession that today is fading into extinction in America, the art of coopering was part of the lifeblood of a rural community.
In today’s world we know these craftsmen not as coopers, but rather as barrel makers, with their primary field of employment being the crafting of casks for the storage and aging of whiskey, bourbon, root beer and other mostly spirituous beverages.
Origin
The word cooper derives from the Middle English word “couper” or “cowper,” which, in turn, is a derivative from the Middle Dutch word kuper or kup, meaning “tub container.” Cooper also comes from the Latin word for vat, which is cupa.
Coopers arrived in America with the first English settlers in the 1620s, and their services were required every step of the way in the early settlement of the country. One of the historically best known coopers was John Alden who arrived on the Mayflower. Most people don’t know the story, but Alden, despite his many pleadings, was unable to be taken on as a passenger aboard the Mayflower because all of its accommodations had been filled. The ship, however, did have an opening for a cooper, and it was in that capacity that Alden was able to be taken aboard since every vessel setting sail had to have at least one cooper.
Specialization
There were three separate branches of the coopering profession. The so-called “wet” coopers made watertight casks and barrels for liquids. The “dry” coopers made containers for meal, grains, sugar and the like. The “white” coopers crafted smaller items such as various buckets for rum, water and powder. Traveling coopers then journeyed from one frontier town to the next each season to repair these wooden containers in the home, bringing some of their specialized tools to perform the work.
Crafting wooden containers
As far as tools were concerned, the cooper utilized some of the most interesting of any frontier craftsman. Because most of his work involved crafting wooden containers for carrying and storing things, the cooper used a froe to do his initial splitting of future staves from a straight-grained tree trunk. He then used a cooper’s side axe — akin to a small broad axe — to do the rough shaping of each stave on his workbench. Then he took the developing staves and shaped them into a slight convex curve on what would be the exterior surface using a draw shave. What would be the interior surface of the stave he shaped into a concave curve using a drawknife with a curved blade.
To shape and shave the edges of each stave the craftsman employed what was called the cooper’s long jointer. This was, in essence, a block plane 6 to 7 feet in length which had the blade on the upward-facing surface. The cooper stood next to the jointer and planed the edges of each stave in the vessel he was creating to the correct angle. After gathering the completed staves into the shape of the vessel desired by using a special windlass and ropes, the cooper employed a wood plane called a croze to cut a continuous groove in the staves near the top and bottom so that the vessel could accept a lid and a bottom board. He finished the vessel by using a curved plane called a sun plane to even off the upper and lower edges, as well as a chamfer knife to create a slight bevel around the interior edge. The interior surface of the vessel was shaved smooth all around by using a closed scorp — an oval-shaped blade equipped with a handle which was drawn upwards against the wood.
Early on, the wooden, interlocking hoops for vessels were made by a separate assistant craftsman called a “hooper.” As time passed and these wooden hoops gave way to less labor-intensive metal hoops, many coopers became their own hoopers.
Coopers also crafted wooden bowls and scoops using a tool called a cooper’s hammer. This tool had the head of a hammer on one side and a curved colt’s foot-shaped blade on the other. The blade allowed the cooper to hollow out blocks of wood to make a curved interior surface.
Containers
Settlers depended on a cooper’s talents for a vast array of containers that included water buckets, cream tubs, nail kegs, wash tubs, butter churns, maple sap pails, barrel funnels, grain measures, tankards, gun powder kegs, syrup jugs, keelers (shallow staved bowls for the quicker cooling of milk), canteens, oyster kegs, well buckets, rum kegs, storage containers of all types, sugar tubs, and swiglers (small kegs that held a swig). Large containers made by the cooper included kilderkin (16 to 18 gallons), rundlets (68 liters), tierce (42 gallons), puncheons (72 to 120 gallons) and butts (130 gallons, primarily for ale). Other very popular products included hogsheads (barrel-size containers) and firkins, which were buckets having one long stave which could serve as a handle, enabling it to be easily carried.
Like so many of the cooper’s once absolutely necessary products, today’s consumers find little use for firkins.
