SustainLife Blog

The LaRue Barn

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The LaRue Barn
The LaRue Barn

We found the LaRue barn through a phone call from a woman in northern New Jersey who had heard about our work of moving and restoring barns. She wanted to know if we would possibly want to move an old barn that was in danger of being demolished to make way for a new suburban development.

At the time this was only our second barn to move, so we did not know entirely what we were getting into, except that we wanted to restore more barns. As it turned out, this unique barn was originally built about 1760 in the northern New Jersey town of Mahwah, close to the New York state border on Route 202, an old Colonial road that runs from Boston to Philadelphia, skirting to the west around New York City. It is what is known as an English-framed barn, though the LaRue family who built it was of French Huguenot descent. The timbers are oak and chestnut, felled by ax from the surrounding virgin forest and hewed by hand. It was moved in 1876 to where we found it, about a half mile from its original location. Moving barns was a common occurrence, as they were meant to last for centuries and could be readily unpegged, disassembled and relocated to another farm.

Crooked Braces

As you look overhead in the LaRue barn you will see unusual curved and dovetailed wind braces connecting the long overhead tie beams to the outside wall posts. These are called “crooked braces” because they were cut from the crook or curved limb of a tree. This feature is unusual to find in an American barn because there was so much good, straight wood available for building timbers that it was not necessary to use such curved pieces of wood. The use of such tree “crucks” indicates that the barn was probably built by a barn framer who learned his trade in Europe, where crucks were often used due to the shortage of straight timber.

Crooked braces
Crooked braces (cruks)

A Role in the American Revolution

Early in its history, the LaRue barn played a role in the American Revolution. During the cold winter of 1780, General George Washington spent two days at the LaRue house, and undoubtedly Continental soldiers under General Washington spent nights in this barn. The soldiers would have been part of a Virginia regiment of “light horse” cavalry under the command of Colonel George Baylor, and were also known as Washington’s “Life Guard,” soldiers whose job it was to protect the commander-in-chief. They accompanied Washington wherever he traveled. It was not far from this barn in 1778, when temporarily detached from the main army, that Colonel Baylor and his cavalrymen were sleeping in barns and were massacred by a British surprise attack in the middle of the night. It was part of a deadly rivalry fomented by a young British officer and spy, Major John Andre, who was later hanged as Benedict Arnold’s accomplice in attempting to sell the important American fort of West Point to the British.

We can imagine these soldiers’ conversation about the war and their families as they settled down in the barn loft for the night. But one thought that definitely did not cross their minds was the fact that one day, over two hundred and twenty years later, some young men from a place called Texas would come to New Jersey and dismantle the barn they were sleeping in and move and rebuild it nearly two thousand miles away—much less that they would fly through the air to get there! We can also most likely claim that “George Washington’s horse slept here!”

We have placed the LaRue barn with a log cabin in a small homestead setting. They are a combination of homestead elements from different times and places: a 1760 New Jersey barn, an 1830 Missouri cabin, an 1860 New York smokehouse, an 1890 New York silo and a 1930 Texas windmill. Yet somehow they all complement one another. If you can, visit in the late afternoon as the sunset casts a golden light across the fields and over the homestead.

 

The First Firing of Our New Wood-Fired Pottery Kiln

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Inside the kiln, a view through the peep-hole
Inside the kiln, a view through the peep-hole

We finished the construction of our new wood-fired kiln on June 16, 2012 and fired it the same day. It was a great success!

Inspecting a vase after the first firing
Inspecting a pot after the first firing

We started the fires at about 5:20AM and fed wood into the kiln for the next 12 hours. The temperature climbed steadily until it reached about 2100°F, then it began to stall. Toward the end of the firing, it is not uncommon to have difficulty getting the temperature all the way up to the required 2400° F.

Feeding the kiln
Fueling the fire

One of the men from the woodworking shop next door came by and gave us a few suggestions on how to stoke the fire, which helped a lot! Once we made some adjustments to how we were managing the fire, the temperature resumed it’s climb and reached 2400° F in roughly 45 minutes. Then we stopped feeding the fire and closed the fire box doors and the damper.

Unbricking the Kiln Door
Unbricking the kiln’s door

On Monday morning, when we unbricked the door (removed the bricks that form the kiln door) and began taking pots out, the results were beautiful! The colors were more vibrant than they had been in our gas-fired kiln, due to the influence of the ash on the glazes.

Inside the Kiln
A look inside the kiln after the first firing

Overall, we are very pleased with the results of the new kiln and look forward to gaining more experience with it in the weeks ahead.

Pottery at the end of our first firing
Pots fired in the first firing

Related articles

To read more about the kiln and how and why we built it, read the articles listed below:

 

Coal for the Blacksmith

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Bituminous Coal
Bituminous coal

Introduction

There are a number of fuels you can use to heat iron for blacksmithing. For most of our work at Heritage Forge, we use coal. Coal is available in several grades, including lignite, bituminous and anthracite. In this article, I discuss the ranking of coal, the type of coal best-suited for blacksmithing and several important points related to the use of coal in your forge.

Grades of Coal

Coal consists primarily of carbon and secondarily of hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen and nitrogen, along with other metallic and non-metallic elements and minerals. Coal is classified both by rank and grade. There is a lot that could be said about rank and grades of coal, but I will stick to what is most relevant to blacksmiths. Coal’s rank is determined by the amount of water, volatile matter and elemental carbon in the coal, as well as its heat content, also known as its calorific value (measured in BTUs). A higher rank coal contains less moisture and volatile matter than a lower rank and has a higher heat content. Grade has to do with coal’s economic value and depends on the amount of minerals, or impurities, contained in it. The composition of coal depends on the conditions in which it was formed, and in some cases, a low-rank coal may be of a higher grade than a high-rank coal. Though additional ranks of coal exist, as blacksmiths, we are concerned mainly with these three: lignite, bituminous and anthracite.

Lignite Coal

Also known as brown coal, lignite is the softest and lowest rank of coal. It is not far removed from peat in its composition and appearance, and it has a distinctly woody texture. Lignite is generally either strip-mined or mined in open pits. Most Texas coal is low-grade lignite, used mainly to power electric plants. As a rule, lignite contains the highest proportion of nonburnable minerals and sulfur of any rank of coal.

Clinker
Clinker

When you burn any type of coal, the nonburnable minerals in the coal, such as metals and silicas, will melt and coagulate in the bottom of the firepot, forming a sticky semi-solid mass known as “clinker”. As clinker builds up, it will begin to block the forge’s air flow and draw heat away from the fire. In fact, that is why old-timers called clinker a “thief”. Because clinker emits contaminants in a hot fire, its presence, even in small amounts, will inhibit forge welding. Although lignite can be used in a forge, it will produce more clinker than any other grade of coal, making it poorly-suited for blacksmithing.

Bituminous Coal

Bituminous is the coal-of-choice for the blacksmith. It is a soft, mid-grade, black coal. Mined from deeper mines than lignite, it burns much more cleanly. When burning coal in the forge, we keep a “stock pile” of wet coal on the sides of the fire. As it smolders, most of the impurities are burned away, leaving primarily carbon, in the form of what we call coke.

Coke
Coke formed by heating bituminous coal in the forge

Having been reduced, coke burns very cleanly and hot, and it is what we heat the steel with. When you properly build and maintain a fire in the forge using bituminous coal, it will produce coke that sticks together in large chunks. The heart of the fire emits a very intense light that can be harmful to your eyes, but by maintaining the fire properly, the smith can keep the heart of the fire covered by a dark layer of coke to shield his eyes from the intense light.

Bituminous has a low sulfur content, which is important for several reasons. Sulfur lowers the quality of the coke, contaminating the steel you are working and causing it to become brittle. It also pollutes the air with sulfur dioxide and sulfur trioxide. When combined with oxygen and water, it forms sulfuric acid, which is very corrosive to all the metal parts of the forge and chimney.

Coal fire in the forge
Coal fire in the forge

Anthracite Coal

Anthracite is the hardest and highest rank of coal available. It is considered a metamorphic rock. When split, it has a bright, shiny cleavage. Anthracite is generally the cleanest burning coal, and it contains the most energy (BTUs) per pound. However, unlike bituminous, the pieces of coke that anthracite produces are small and tend to blow up and out of the fire. Because of this, it also does not shield the smith from the brightness of the heart of the fire and is not as commonly used for blacksmithing.

In the U.S., anthracite is mined from deep mines in small areas of Pennsylvania and Oregon. An interesting historical fact is that during the American Civil War, blockade runners used anthracite to fuel their steam boilers. Any smoke would give them away, but anthracite was so clean-burning that it produced no visible smoke.

Conclusion

In conclusion, bituminous is the best coal for the blacksmith. It is relatively clean-burning, cokes up nicely, making it easy to manage the fire well, and it produces relatively little clinker. Some of the best bituminous coal in the south is taken from mines near Birmingham, Alabama, which are the source of the coal we use at Heritage Forge.

Online Benefit Auction for The Ploughshare

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Online Benefit Auction
A few of the items in our online benefit auction. Click the photo to view all items.

UPDATE: The Auction has Ended.

We invite you to participate in our 2nd Online Benefit Auction.

The auction features:

  • One-of-a-kind Heirloom Furniture
  • Hand-sewn Quilts
  • Award-winning pieces

There are 21 pieces in all.

All proceeds will go to benefit The Ploughshare Institute for Sustainable Culture.

More Information

Here is your opportunity to purchase a one-of-a-kind heirloom piece of furniture or hand-sewn quilt while supporting a worthy cause.  This auction has expanded significantly from the first auction, held in 2011, and will feature several unique, custom furniture pieces hand-made by a number of craftsmen including Frank Strazza, master woodworker and teacher at The Ploughshare’s Heritage School of Woodworking in Central Texas. The auction items are available to view online now, and bidding will open on Thursday, June 21. Bidding closes at 8PM Central, Sunday, June 24.

All proceeds from the auction will go to support The Ploughshare in our efforts to continue to expand our class offerings and student capacity.

Again, this is a great opportunity to own a unique and valuable piece of artisan craftwork while investing in a worthy cause—helping to promote and teach traditional trades, crafts and sustainable living skills to people around the globe.

Taking Baskets off the Shelf

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Baskets

Growing up, there were baskets all over our house—decorating the walls; filled with balls of yarn, toys or books; tucked into nooks and crannies on the shelves. My mom collected baskets, and often when she went out, she would come home with yet another beautiful basket. Although I enjoyed doing a wide variety of crafts, such as sewing, knitting,  crocheting and cross-stitching, the thought of weaving a basket had never occurred to me. It wasn’t until I started looking for something new and different to make for my best friend’s birthday that I had the idea to weave a basket. She was newly engaged, and I wanted to make her something for her new life, so I wove her a Shaker cat-head basket and filled it with cloth napkins and several other gifts. I thought making a basket would be a fun, one-time project, but after that, I was hooked. I read basketry books, ordered supplies and jumped straight into basketry, not knowing where it would lead.

Although baskets today are often used as decoration, for thousands of years baskets served as useful containers; and having been custom-made for specific functions, they filled many needs in people’s daily lives. Newborn babies slept in hand-woven cradles or bassinets. Children gathered freshly laid eggs into egg baskets which perfectly fit this task. Made with two rounded side pockets, ribbed egg baskets allow the eggs to gently nestle together so they don’t jostle around and break. Wicker hampers and laundry baskets held the family’s laundry.

Field baskets of all sizes were perfect for harvesting crops ranging from green beans to cotton. People walked to local markets to shop, carrying their goods home in market baskets. Picnic baskets with lids were ideal for transporting the family’s Sunday meal for “dinner-on-the-grounds” after church. Dough rising baskets left their pattern imprinted on finished loaves of bread, and once removed from the oven, the hot, crusty loaves were served in bread baskets. Fishermen tossed their catches of fish into wicker creels slung over their shoulders, and some still do so today. Lining the creel with moss and then dampening the moss allowed the fisherman to keep his catch cool all day [1].  Using basket making skills and materials, people fashioned sandals, fences and even dwellings. Whatever needed carrying or storing, people would make a basket to fit the  need—backpack baskets, totes with woven handles and even tightly woven baskets for hauling water. Ancient baskets even served as the forms on which clay vessels were shaped. It’s only more recently that baskets have found their primary place on the wall or the shelf as a decoration.

Traditionally, people crafted baskets from materials that grew locally. Indians in Florida, Louisiana and Texas stitched coils of pine needles together with fern roots or swamp grass; whereas Indians in New Mexico coiled bunches of Sacahuista (Nolina microcarpa), stitching them together with yucca to form sturdy, functional baskets. White oak trees grew plentifully in the Ozark and Appalachian Mountains where basket makers would search for and select the “perfect” tree for pulling splints  to weave into apple baskets, egg baskets, pie baskets, market baskets and many others. In northern states such as Maine, New York and Massachusetts, basket makers would make splints from logs cut from Brown Ash or Black Ash trees. Honeysuckle vines, grapevines, wisteria vines, cattails, climbing okra vines, corn husks, willow, rattan palm and bamboo are just a few of the many natural materials that you can harvest, prepare and craft into useful baskets. When harvesting natural materials, one rule of thumb is that if you can wrap a green vine around your wrist without it snapping, it is flexible enough to use for handles, spokes and the basic framework of a basket. A vine that is flexible enough to wrap around your finger without breaking will work well as weaving material.

Knowing when and how to harvest and prepare local, natural materials and weave them into a basket takes skill. Traditionally this know-how was passed down from previous generations. Children easily learned these skills because basket making was a way of life. I learned to make baskets from books because I knew of no one at the time who made or even knew how to make baskets, though I’ve met a number of basket makers since then. That was several years before I married and had my first child. Later, while my children were still young, I made quite a few baskets and taught classes to children and adults. As I wove baskets, my children would watch and play with the scraps, fashioning them into their own “baskets” and other interesting structures. One day, when I had been weaving a ribbed egg basket, I put it down for a moment to attend to something else, and my oldest daughter, who was almost four years old, picked it up and began weaving. To my surprise, she wove several rows quite well without any help or prior instruction. As she grew older she continued to make baskets and helped teach others.

Soon after I had made my first basket, I became interested in weaving baskets from local materials, so I started reading anything I could find about that. We found a few articles on honeysuckle, so we went in search of honeysuckle vines. Books said honeysuckle grew on the ground in long straight runners, but the only honeysuckle vines we found grew all over fences in tangled, gnarled clumps. Undeterred, we pulled, cut and hauled home masses of vines. The instructions I had read said to boil the vines for four hours, then strip the bark and soak the vines for another thirty minutes before using. That sounded simple enough, so we boiled the first batch in a water bath canner on the kitchen stove. At first, the smell was pleasant, but after four hours of boiling, the smell wasn’t nearly as pleasant. (After that lesson, we boiled our honeysuckle vines outside.) We took the boiled vines, still curly even after boiling, and twined them into round baskets that looked rustic and primitive but were strong and sturdy. These were my mom’s favorite baskets. We felt a joyful sense of accomplishment at having made baskets from what we had harvested ourselves, and this inspired us to look for and use other materials. The whole thing was quite an adventure—those times of being entangled in honeysuckle vines as I worked together with my mom and sisters to pull the vines free, or the times when I took my class of young basketry students to harvest grapevines. Most of the children in the class were small, and as they tugged on the thick grapevines hanging from trees, they would  invariably end up swinging in the air instead of freeing the vine. Peals of laughter would fill the air, and we all had a good time.

We learned to make pine needle baskets, too. The pine needles that grew near us were short, but driving back home to Texas from a trip we had taken to the East Coast, we passed through Louisiana after a bad storm, and there were branches of nice long pine needles lying all along the sides of the highway. We stopped and searched the car for as many empty bags as we could find, then stuffed them full of fallen pine needles. Once we got home, we spread the fresh green needles on our front porch to dry. Later, we stitched them into coiled baskets and coasters.

Shortly after I had made my first basket, I started teaching basketry classes for children. Martha May was one of my students, who started making baskets when she was fourteen years old. From the beginning, she showed a strong interest in basket weaving and did well with it. After a few years she began to help me teach, and now she is The Ploughshare’s main teacher of basket classes, along with teaching classes to children and adults in our community. She has made many beautiful baskets and continues to broaden her horizons, making sandals out of canna lily leaves and raffia, cradles for infants and beautiful pine needle baskets that are sold in our fine crafts gallery.

Basket making is a skill nearly anyone can learn, and you can take basketry to any level you desire—from making simple, functional baskets that you can complete in a few hours to making finely crafted masterpieces that take days or even weeks to complete.

References:

[1] Wikipedia – Creel (basket).

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