A Hand-made Village

by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

IN these days of machines and machine-work, when even the elements are harnessed down and made to bear the brunt of the labour of the world, when even horseflesh is gradually becoming valueless, when cogs and wheels, and gasoline, and steam, and electricity carry us, push us, clothe us, and feed us, we have little realisation of what a hand-made village ever meant.

And yet it was not so long ago that a hand-made village was an actual fact. From the time one entered the boundary of the town, or “precinct,” one encountered nothing except handiwork.

The roads were all made by the patient hands of day labourers. There were no steam-rollers to frighten the steeds of other days—only a long line of bent men digging and smoothing for their bread and butter, in order to make the highways passable for the pedestrians, the riders in chaises and sulkies, and the mail coaches. It is true that some of the roads, especially in the southern part of the country, were pretty bad, but hands did all they could.

If a man who flourished a century ago could come to life again upon a macadamised road, and see automobiles and trolley-cars flying past him, he would very likely think himself on another planet. Possibly the great Cotton Mather, could he be reincarnated in Boston town, the great Cotton with his belief in the supernatural and witchcraft, would even try his utmost to have all trolley-men and chauffeurs and their vehicles included in an auto da fé for the grace of God and the purging of the land from the practices of the devil.

It might be amusing and interesting to imagine the great divine again in his old haunts, and viewing the progress made since he left them.

How hard he would look at the tunnel, which desecrated the tomb of his contemporaries for the good of their descendants! How he would possibly commend his soul to his Maker before that wild plunge into the bowels of the earth on the Mall, to emerge into daylight in the north part of Boston town! What would he say to the witch-like progress of the trolley-cars, with no apparent motive-power except something after the fashion of a broomstick sweeping a wire? How he would stand and solemnly gaze at the electric-light poles!

He might esteem it a miracle if he were in a house which could be flooded with light by the pressure of a button on the wall. He would certainly write innumerable sermons about such a phenomenon, and command attendance at all the meeting-houses through interminable hours.

Conceive what it would mean to a man to make one stride from candles to electricity. Think of the laborious process of candle-making, the careful saving of wax and tallow and bayberries, the melting and dipping which was a large part of the year's work for housewives. Think even of the difference in obtaining light at all, the running to secure some coals from a neighbour's hearth-fire, the nerve-wearing work of striking light with flint and steel.

But in those days all light, save that of the sun and moon and stars, was in its truest sense hand made. Of course even to-day all artificial light, so-called, depends upon human labour, but not, as in former days, upon individual human labour. How many of us have had actually to employ manual labour to secure light during dark hours for work or amusement?

We work, it is true, but in a sense our feet and hands, our factors of work, have become multiplied, and the end is not yet. We accomplish in a single day more than some of our forebears by unremitting industry could accomplish in a year; and still the wonder grows if the work accomplished by these superadded members of action, these machines and innumerable devices to husband and speed the human nerve and muscle, is quite as perfect, as God-fearing even, as that which bore the thumb-mark.

Nobody but will concede that the lights are better, nobody but will concede that the facilities for transit are better, for communications between various quarters of the globe; but when we consider the products of the factories, and those which were patiently and slowly wrought with toil-roughened fingers, with an alert brain as supervisor, one wonders if there is really an advance.

In the hand-made village it is true that the people froze in winter in their badly heated houses, they suffered in summer in their screenless and blindless rooms, they had less comfort; but did they not have as reward for their industry better products?

Think of the houses in the hand-made village, all the beams, and rafters of which were joined with hand-wrought nails. Think of the wainscoted walls, built for generations. No repapering and plastering were needed there. The thumb-mark of the worker was on those walls. His best strength was in them, and they were built to endure.

Think of the ceilings with their great summertrees. Not much danger of plaster falling, to the destruction of household treasures, in those houses. The great central chimney, when, after the period of catted chimneys, bricks had come into use, was a tower of strength for the house. It is true that they afforded possibly too good ventilation, but the chimney was there, and to stay.

Look at the solid pieces of old-time furniture which once were gathered together in the homes of the hand-made village, and supplied the needs of their owners. The makers and the owners thereof are long since dead, their ashes returned to the earth; and their very names have faded from their tombstones, but here are their work and their possessions, as solid and fine as when first fashioned. The old tables are much more stable than the tables of to-day, although they have been weighted down with a hundred Thanksgiving dinners, and the great plates and platters of pewter, which also endure.

It is improbable that the work of a man who uses a machine in a modern furniture factory will endure in its first strength a century after he has passed away. His work will follow closely upon his heels. It is really something to construct anything which will survive one for a hundred years, and lose nothing of its beauty and utility, even if it be nothing more than a table. One table made with painstaking care to endure is so much better than nothing at all.

When one looks at the solid old chairs, some of a period which antedated the rush-bottom, and sees them as sturdy as if they had not afforded rest for a generation, and more than a generation, one admires and feels a certain respect for the maker, although his name be all unknown to fame. His chair survives, and one can sit in it securely, and rest and reflect that it is a good deal to make even a chair which will outlive one many years, because, after all, one's work is one's true life—that is, the earthly part of it.

To think that one can offer rest and comfort from his handiwork, generations after he is laid away and his very existence forgotten, gives one a sense of immortality. To be sure, it may not be immortality of the highest order, but the immortality of all good work is essential in nature, whether the work be a chair or a great poem.

Probably Milton, to save his life, could not have made a chair, but another man could and did make the chair in which the reader of Milton sits. It is small immortality, but everything is of its kind.

When one sees the hand-made implements of labour, clumsy as they may be, they are not yet in need of repair, and one feels a certain respect for them, the well-wrought tools with which the work was done, as well as for the work. The hammer which pounded down those hand-made nails is still intact. The mortar and pestle with which the housewife powdered her spices may be a little lessened in bulk by years, but that is because of the nature of the material and the law of friction, not because of the careless workmanship. The maker of that mortar and pestle made it by the best light of his soul and the utmost cunning of his hands. He was not a great man, but he made a mortar and pestle which endure now he has gone.

The quilted petticoats of our ancestresses are in themselves monuments and commentaries of industry and thrift. I have seen one over two hundred years old. It is not worn out. It looks indestructible. It is thick and stiff, and covered with a pattern of closely interwoven stitches, which stiffen it still more.

It seems incredible that any woman could have worn such a garment, and still more incredible that she could have made it. But make it she did. It is Occidental, as much as a well-worn prayer-rug is Oriental. It is in a way foolish and absurd. It is not exactly a thing of beauty, but it is an almost imperishable product of hand-work. One can imagine the quilter sitting by some west window, in order to secure the most of the waning daylight, week after week, taking those elaborate stitches. One can imagine the dreams which she wrought in with them.

This was a wedding petticoat, a part of one of the scanty bridal outfits of the time. No doubt many of the dreams came to pass, no doubt many did not; but dreams and dreamer have passed away, and the piece of work wrought by those little woman-hands remains. Her grave even is lost, her gravestone crumbled; but here is her little womanly epitaph, the proof that she once lived, and was industrious, and, according to her might, did what her hands found to do.

It is the same with old blue-and-white coverlids of the hand-made village. They served to keep warm those whom they would outlast. They comforted the sleepers who made them, and whom they would survive. There is something fairly majestic about the long livelihood of honest hand-work. Think of those really beautiful old blue-and-white fabrics made on hand-looms from flax which was carded and all the rest by hand, serving us now as portières and couch covers, and utterly unimpaired by age. They will survive us also—unless some mischance of fire befall—and who knows how many of the youngest generation around us?

There is something tragically pathetic in the thought that the little things which man makes for his comfort here on earth should so long outlast the worker, who is of so much more importance than his work. But after all, that applies to earthly considerations alone. The worker takes with him the consciousness of his task well done, however humble the task may be, whither he goeth, and has his reward.

The articles which made up the home-made village—the few houses which fire and vandals have not destroyed, the faithfully wrought furniture with which the rooms were fitted, the linen, the coverlids, the fine needlework—remain, and may seem to us to have outlived their makers; but the honest workers have survived, and will survive, their work, which is in itself the proof of it.