Clay Thigpen
10-22-2008, 12:28 AM
I thought this might be interesting to some of you since I've seen where you discussed places like the wood shop at Williamsburg and other such places. I attended an event this passed weekend at Westville,GA it's a little town they've put together to simulate an 1850's town in rural Georgia. The wood shop there produces small chairs and stools out of cedar, they go from the tree to the finished product. For this event they allowed a woodworker I know to use the shop to produce a child's coffin. He along with another gentleman and an apprentice took only about a day and a half to go from the dressed lumber to the finished coffin. What was really neat was to watch the apprentice as he helped around the shop, cutting boards to length ripping them and cutting kerfs to bend the sides. I did my best to watch the progression from one day to the next I witnessed everything from a bench ax to a set of molding planes being used on the project. I think it was neat that the town allowed them to use the shop and some of the tools as well ( I think, they brought alot of their own as well) to do this. I doubt you'd find many places now willing to allow this.