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01396Franklin E. Coyne,
The Development of the Cooperage Industry in the United States, 1620-1940
(Chicago: Lumber Buyers Publishing Company, 1940).
[page 7]
Introduction
If long continuation renders a trade venerable and those who follow it honorable, then the cooper, by suchassociation with the ancient lineage of the wooden barrel, must be the salt of the earth. Barrels were made andused by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians before the beginnings of recorded history. We read of "a handful of meal in a barrel" in the days of the early Hebrews, and Elijah used, or least commanded the use of tight barrels for the drenching of the altar, when he was in controversy with the pretended prophets of Baal.More than eighteen hundred years ago Pliny, the Roman investigator, who lost his life trying to find outwhat made a volcano smoke, tried unsuccessfully to trace the origin of barrel-making. He did discover, however,that a race of people at the foot of the Alps were familiar with the art of assembling staves to make barrels in hisday.The construction of the wooden barrel is worked out, not by accidental methods, but along scientific linesand embodying engineering principles. The principal of the arch, formed by the stave accurately listed or shapedto conform to a given circle, is the first fundamental in barrel construction. As each stave rests in a set positionand all are bound by external hoop pressure, the entire assembly of staves and heads becomes a compact and singleunit. The staves are so listed that the lines of the joints, when projected toward the center, meet and form a seriesof acute angles. Due to this construction, any external impact or shock is automatically transmitted throughoutevery unit of material, and the resiliency thus afforded the barrel modifies the force of such impact.The convenience of vessels made with staves, their simplicity of construction and their durability, together with the wide range of uses to which they were suited, made the trade of the cooper a very necessary one in thedevelopment of society. The discovery that oak, whose every product is disagreeable to the taste, gave a peculiar and pleasing flavor to beverages stored in it, gave this wood a prominence in the cooperage world as a receptaclefor the products of the vineyard and still.The earliest type of barrel probably was the one consisting of a log hollowed out and the end covered withskins. In the days of the Crusades barrels as we know them were common and were used extensively as containersfor all liquids and for many such commodities as spices, salt, and peppers which were brought to Europe from theHoly Land.Since the discovery of gunpowder, the wooden keg has been the only container in which it has beenshipped. Even in comparatively modern times, when the metal hoop has come into use, manufacturers have beenobliged to continue the use of hickory hoops on gunpowder kegs to reduce the danger of sparks. Privateers usedwooden barrels and kegs for rum as well as for tobacco, spice, gold and other things.The liquor industry would be in a bad way were it not for the existence of the ordinary wooden barrel.Whisky improves with age as long as it remains in the barrel, but does not age at all in the bottle. The best whiskyis aged in new, white oak charred containers.There are two classifications into which barrels and kegs logically fall. Tight barrels are carriers of liquids and slack barrels are used for solids. While the construction of these two types is basically the same, theydiffer in detail as to thickness and types of staves, hoops and heading. They are also grouped according to sizes incommercial classification. In tight cooperage, sizes up to 25 gallons are called kegs, and those from 25 to 60gallons are called barrels. Those above 60 gallons are known as casks, butts, and hogsheads.These few recorded facts are merely mentioned to prove that while the manufacturer of tight barrels is avery ancient trade there has been very little, if any, real improvement made in the details of its construction, whichwhen considered as a whole, is in reality a work of art, and there is no doubt but that it was a remarkableachievement for the originators to conceive the form[page 8]in which it is made, and the essential details necessary to make of it the satisfactory container it has proved itself to be.When one considers the form of the chime, the opening in the center of the heading joints, the narrow andsatisfactory croze, the arch construction of the body of the barrel, and the method of holding the whole together,making of it without doubt, the strongest possible container for any product, it makes one marvel at its simplicity
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and perfection, and any real improvement in its construction would be almost an impossibility.In the Middle Ages, everything that pertained to drinks touched royalty with a tangent, and the royalfingers were often in the cooperage pie. The title "cooper to his majesty" was a synonym for wealth, prestige andease. The jealousies of royalty led to the promulgation of many decrees regulating capacities and designations of vessels. The size of the container in which the sovereign stored his liquor was an index of how seriously he took himself. The telepathic suggestion of a "snifter" gave to the
haut ton
the "pipe", a container twice the size of ahog
=
s head; a vessel that was enlarged again to suit the capacities of the satellites of Good Queen Bess, giving usthe "Queen
=
s Pipe", the culmination of the cooper
=
s art.A patriotic Dutchman modeled a vessel of royal dimension and capacity after a plethoric burgomaster, andgave to the world the "Berliner"; the oval head, a cross-section through the cadaver of a burgher who passed awayfull of years and stale beer.Some European royal personage conceived the idea of what is crystallized in American political argot as"the whole hog," when he ordered that a vessel containing a quantity "sufficient for a gentleman
=
s drinking for one quarter" (three months) should be called and known as a hog
=
s head.Export trade in the original thirteen American colonies created a demand for cooperage early in their history. Unlike most other Colonial industries, it was in no way localized, but rather attained prominence in bothnorth and south at once. New England rum, Carolina tar and rosin, and Pennsylvania whisky, called for tight barrel cooperage at an early date, while rice and Virginia tobacco demanded the first American slack barrels.In the absence of good transportation, stock had to be manufactured where it was used, and the cooper shop was often the nucleus from which grew many a flourishing town. The cooper was usually a potent factor inthe town
=
s life; often an arbiter of destiny. Among the early annals of Salem is an account of one ZerubbabelHOIT, a cooper who was once admonished for "shaving staves" after sunset on Saturday, the same being a "near violation of the Sabbath Day." His defense was that the day was cloudy and he had no means of knowing that thesun had set.The following chapters trace the course of cooperage development in a general way in the United States, beginning with John ALDEN, a cooper of the Mayflower, to the year 1940.[page 9][photos][CAPTION: . . .]Coopers making whale oil barrels drew more pay than when making the regular run of cooperage.
Chapter I
OUR ENGLISH HERITAGEIt may be rightfully said that the beginning of the cooperage industry in the United States had its inceptionin the colony established by the Pilgrims. Of the one hundred and one persons who made the crossing of theAtlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, and of which only thirty-four were grown men, the rest being women andchildren, there is the record that one of them, John ALDEN, was a cooper and was hired as such.Governor BRADFORD, in his history of the Plymouth Colony, refers to him as follows:
"John ALDEN was hired for a cowper, at South-Hampton, where the ship victuled; and being a hopeful young man, was much desired, but left to his own liking to go or stay when he came here; but he stayed, and married here."
It is more than probable that others of the original Pilgrims were familiar with the art of coopering, whichhad been well established in England since Elizabethean[
sic
]days, when guilds of English coopers formed animportant part of the trade unions of that time, which saw a vast amount of barrels, casks, kegs, pipes, hogsheads,and other wooden containers turned out in English cooper shops for use on English ships which scoured everycorner of the known world.The Mayflower itself was well stocked with stout wooden containers of English oak, in which were packedor stored supplies of foodstuffs, powder, oils, and other commodities. Heavy iron bands were used for hoops onthese substantial containers, making them, together with their heavy oak staves, objects of considerable weight. Nearly all of the containers were constructed to hold liquids, and so were classified as "tight" cooperage. When
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they became, after many years of service, unsuitable for liquids, they were used for drystuffs, and became "slack"containers. They were primarily constructed to endure, and endure they did, being used over and over again for one commodity after another.The first containers of New England, together with the few hand tools for keeping them in repair, were brought from England. These simple tools were those used by the coopers of that day
C
a drawing knife for theshaping of the staves and clamps for fastening them in shape. During their lifetimes in New England, the Pilgrimsthemselves became, of necessity, cleavers of timber and fabricators of containers. When the primary need of small boats for exploring the territory and for bearing small cargoes on the shallow rivers, together with the need of whale oil for the lamps, were temporarily fulfilled
C
the one by the hard work of timbering and carpentry and theother by the fortunate incident of drift whales being washed ashore after storms
C
subsequent rapid developmentsof trade brought about a considerable demand for containers. The most important of these develop-[page 10]ments were growth of a good market for codfish, the profitable enterprise of making rum from molasses and sugar,and the beginning of trade in naval stores for shipbuilding and maintenance.Thus, Johnny Puritan, going to take the whale, found much better profit in the codfish, of which he wasable to secure 60,000 in a single month. No phase of potential profit escaped the vigilence[
sic
]of the earlyMassachusetts legislators, whose economic theories were inherited from medieval England. Governor BRADFORD sent a company to Piscataqua (now Portsmouth) in 1623, to establish a fishery and a plantation. herethe company also erected a salt works to obtain pure salt for the packing and storing of fish. Another fishery wasset us[
sic
]at Cape Ann, and these enterprises began the great industry which has been called the corner stone of New England prosperity.Some of the first ships returning to England from the Pilgrim colony carried back barrels and casks of salted codfish. In a very short time there was developed a considerable demand for this New England product atother European ports, and especially those of Spain and Portugal and the Catholic countries of Europe, because of the fast days decreed by the Church of Rome. What the French peasant thought of the newly discovered NewEngland delicacy is exemplified in the trite saying of the day: "The codfish is more important than Louis XIV."From the humble beginning of extracting oil from drift whales for their lamps, the New England colonistswere to see the whale oil industry become, in about 1670, a very profitable undertaking. A cargo from Boston toAmsterdam in about 1630 included 748 barrels of oil "of New England fishing." A few years later someonerecorded a shipment from Massachusetts of two cargoes of 144 barrels and 152 barrels of whale oil to London. Nantucket was to become a leading center of whale fishing after the year of 1700, and it was there recorded that 27 barrels of oil were extracted from a yearling whale killed there in 1707.While most of the first containers for fish and oil were brought from England, the demand for cooperage products was so great as to cause considerable concern to the Massachusetts legislators. As early as 1631 a man bythe name of GIBBONS started the first sawmill in Piscataqua (Portsmouth). While this mill was largely occupiedwith turning out lumber suitable for boat building, a considerable number of bolts from which staves were hewnwere also turned out at this establishment. Water-power furnished the force necessary to operate this mill. Twoother mills were established in New Hampshire a few years later. These mills possessed four saws and werelikewise powered by water. The products of these mills, together with the efforts of the few coopers in[page 11]the colony were unable to meet the ever-increasing demand for barrels, casks, pipes and hogsheads.
Need For Containers
The record of the Governors of Massachusetts reveal that they were in correspondence with cooperagefirms in England "to provide us some staves," in 1642. In the same year the Massachusetts Court ordered that allvessels of cask used for any liquor, fish, or other commodity should be of London assize, and appointed inspectorsto gauge these vessels and mark them with the gauger
=
s mark.The demand for coopers in New England and the relatively high rate of pay for their services soon brought many adventurous craftsmen in this trade from England. The passage rate from England was establishedat 5 English pounds in 1630. Pipe staves at this period were at a premium and were valued at the extraordinary
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The Development of the Cooperage Industry in the United States, 1620-1940
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