Something random for a cold cold day

In his 1858 book, A History of Middle Tennessee, historian A.W. Putnam invented an oft-repeated myth:  namely, that the first permanent settlement of Nashville came on Christmas day, 1779 when a large party crossed the frozen Cumberland River near the present-day downtown.

 I'm looking at this stuff because of this...

The 2 photos above are of one of several letters given to me by my grandmother, Odene Biffle.  They were written to her grandfather, Mr. James Sneed, by his brother in Henrico County, Virginia.  In case you can't tell, the bottom photo shows the letter was being sent to:   Mr. James Sneed, Tenefee State Near Nafhvile (sic).  In the top picture you can see it was written January 20th, 1802, or three years after that historic--and mythical--river crossing.   I've been looking into these letters--which I've had for a quite a while--because I finally decided to do something with them.

What I've done, by the way, is to finally carefully unfold them and preserve them between pieces of glass framed by some old recovered heart pine (probably of the same age as the letter!).  I gave one of them to my sister as a Christmas present.  I'd like to tell you I've researched proper archival techniques for such historic documents (the state of Tennessee has in it's archive a collection called "The Sneed Family Letters" which is said to be one of the most complete collections of early Tennessee historic information available).  I'd like to tell you I used archival glass.  UV protected and stuff.  Or sealed the frame properly to keep it from harmful air exposure.  I haven't done any of that, but hey, these things are 200 years old and I've been toting them around for a decade in an old shoe box.  Hopefully they'll hang in there until I can do it right...

Anyway...

The fun part (for me at least) about this is all the random connections.  It's cold here in Charleston today.  Really, really cold.  It got down to 19 degrees F.  My pipes in the warehouse froze.  It happens to be a little after Christmas, just like in that cold cold story of the river crossing.  The letter itself actually mentions news of yet another Sneed brother and how he was getting along with his business dealings in Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina--and hey! I live in Charleston now!  And finally, one more odd connection is that in looking at all this historic stuff I found another mention of a progenitor as it pertains to the veracity of our aforementioned historian, A. W. Putnam.  It is as follows:
Yet another historian, Judge John Haywood, wrote in his 1823 book A Civil and Political History of Tennessee that he got "much information from frontiersman John Raines, who actually came across the ice" and Raines mentioned nothing of a Christmas crossing.  The connection is...tah dah:  My grandmother's grandfather on the other side was John Raines.  

Pretty cool, huh?  Or should I say cold?  

First Things First

When I started my first semester at craft school, my teacher, Graham Campbell, wrote two rules up on a chalk board.  Those rules stayed there, and were often pointed out, for the next several years.

Here are those two rules:

1) Wood moves.

2) Short grain will getcha.

While both these rules are imperative concepts for a woodworker, only the first one--wood moves--offers anything that makes for interesting reading, so I'm just gonna stick with that one.

Here's the short way to explain this:  even after a tree has been chopped down, cut into boards, kiln-dried, turned into a piece of furniture and slathered with some kind of finish, that wood still collects and sheds moisture just as it did when it was a living tree.  That's the reason you may have encountered a door that won't stay closed in the winter and can't fit in its frame in the summer.  Summer months tend to be wetter, humid months, so the wood swells.  Winter months are dry, so the wood shrinks.

To the left is a picture a of a homemade hygrometer I have in our house.
It was made by gluing the brown wood--a wide strip of end grain-- to the blond wood--a long, skinny strip of long grain.  Wood movement really only comes into play across the wood and not end to end.  So what's happening here is that the end grain piece is taking on or giving up moisture according to season, and getting longer or shorter respectively.  The long grain piece it's glued to doesn't want to let it do that.  The result, now that it's June, is the short grain has expanded so much it's bending the whole piece to the right.  Just four short months ago it was actually bent the other way.

Isn't that something!


Here's the more fun way to talk about this:  Graham taught us--drilled into us, actually--that you can't argue with wood.  You're not gonna beat it.  If wood wants to move there is no amount of space-age glue, screws or prayer that's gonna hold it steady.

Don't believe it?  I've heard that back in the day demolition crews building the railroads would occasionally encounter stones in their path that were so large that no responsible amount of dynamite could move or break it.  In that situation the crew fetched up a big old wedge of white oak.  The wedge was driven into an available crack and buckets of water were poured on.  After a day or two, that wedge would start to swell and swell.  The rock would sit, and the wedge would swell.  Then the wedge would swell some more and then, inexorably, there would be a loud Crack! and a rock the size of a house would simply split in two.   (That's why the game was originally Rock, Wood, Scissors.)

Perhaps this tale is apocryphal (and I made up that part about rock wood scissors.)  In any case,  I do know I've seen plenty of examples of wood doing exactly what it wants.  One always has to allow for movement. When making a frame and panel door, you always have to leave a little bit of room for that panel to shrink and swell or you're gonna end up with a warped door or a cracked frame.  A table top has got to have room to expand and contract or it's gonna curl up on the sides in winter, bow up in the middle during summer, or quite possibly both.

Finally, here's one last thing about Graham's rules on the board:  Life at the craft center was an interesting thing.  We were out in the middle of nowhere.  A whole lot of time was spent in the studio.  Tiny games were invented as a creative, but low-pressure way to maintain one's sanity.  One day I walked into the wood studio and noticed that someone had changed that first rule on the board.  It said:

                                                            Wood Moose

A few days later rule #2 had changed.  This time, instead of "short grain will getcha" it said:

Short Granny'll Getcha!

This went on for months.  I don't know how many iterations we eventually came up with, but by the end not even the code-busters that cracked The Enigma would have been able to figure out where it all started.