While my wife, Carolyn, was recently buying some wood at Sweet Lumber Company, in the Olneyville section of Providence, I noticed this photograph of a saw that cut shingles.
Who knew what a magnificent piece of machinery there was to render wooden shingles from logs?! It is hard not to be impressed by this no-nonsense beast, capable of severing a hand or an arm in an instant. It was made in Orange, Mass., sometime after 1889, the year of its patent.
Orange is in Franklin County, not far from Greenfield and Millers Falls and Turners Falls, serious 19th-Century mill towns, producing sewing machines, cutlery and a range of tools. While we associate manufacturing with cities such as Manchester, Lowell and Fall River, machine shops and watermills were found throughout western New England.
Beyond the cities of Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, there were a lot of factories in small rural towns. If there were a swiftly flowing stream, waterpower would power a mill of some kind
The Chase Turbine Manufacturing Company was founded around 1850 in Concord, Vt., up in that state’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’
The company went bust during the Civil War, but soon thereafter reconstituted itself in the more economically advantageous location of Orange. They made equipment for water wheels and the magnificent turbine shingle saw until the Great Depression.
The inscription on it says it all: “Built by the Chase Turbine M'F'G'. Co. Orange, Mass.’’ This is no wimpy Chinese-made throwaway tool from Home Depot, but something built to last – Yankee ingenuity writ large. In many a Vermont hollow, singles are no doubt still being cleaved from trees by these glorious machines.
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, photographer and essayist. He is the author of Yankee Modern and The Cape Cod Cottage, among other books.
