Anne Briggs, a woodworker, farmer and builder based in Nashville, Tennessee, teaches skills that are disappearing in the modern world. So perhaps it is no surprise that she calls Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area “my favorite place in the world.”
“People say I was born 200 years too late,” said Briggs. “At Williamsburg I get to see in person things I’ve only read about in books.”
Earlier this year, Briggs was invited to visit Williamsburg in collaboration with Craft & Forge, a new Colonial Williamsburg brand that is bringing artisans and manufacturers to the Historic Area to inspire products that are modern interpretations of early American styles. To get a sense of how these products are developed, she was introduced to the Colonial Williamsburg tradesmen, tradeswomen and curators who practice and study the 18th-century details that can be seen in Craft & Forge products.
Kiri Franco, Colonial Williamsburg’s director of brand and licensing, said the decision to create a new brand came about from a desire to build partnerships with modern makers interested in connecting with the past. Craft & Forge is growing, adding by the end of the year indoor/outdoor rugs, furniture, bedding and even coffee.
“The WILLIAMSBURG brand has existed since the 1930s, and we didn’t want to dilute what we are doing with that brand,” Franco said. “But some of the things we’ve seen in the past 10 years are a pared-down, more casual style, and there’s been a resurgence of independent makers. We wanted to tap into this market and bring artisan makers here to share our story.”
The makers might be inspired by materials and skills of Colonial Williamsburg’s historic tradespeople, by looking at the Foundation’s architecture or by exploring the vast archaeology, museum and library collections.
The Dough Bowl
For Briggs, the visit to Williamsburg inspired her to demonstrate new techniques to her followers. For example, she saw a dough bowl in a Williamsburg kitchen. Sometimes referred to as a “trencher” in the 18th century, the bowl, which is about the size of a kitchen sink, was carved from a single piece of wood. The baker mixed and kneaded the dough in the trencher and then left it there to rise.
Making a dough bowl without power tools is extremely labor intensive: You have to use a sledgehammer and wedges to split a stump by hand; then choose the best parts for a bowl; then use a series of smaller and smaller axes to chop out the exterior of the bowl; and finally use an adze, a cutting tool similar to an ax, to carve out the interior of the bowl.
“It was 10 hours of extremely difficult physical labor,” Briggs said. “Imagine taking a 350-pound log and turning it into a 10-pound object, completely by hand. The shavings from the project filled up six wheelbarrows. I was sore for several days afterward.”
Briggs has no intention of producing other dough bowls completely by hand. Rather, this was part of an educational project to show how to make pizza by creating every piece of equipment and every ingredient herself. That included building an outdoor oven, getting milk for the cheese from her own cow and raising cattle for the beef that went into the pepperoni.
Briggs does not expect others to go to the same lengths. “But when I do things to a ridiculous degree, I always try to find something more universally useful,” she said. “And I’m building an appreciation for how many things we have and take for granted. For me it’s a beautiful blending of history and helping people understand what goes into the things they casually buy. And now I have my dough bowl.”
Briggs also came away from Williamsburg with another skill. Bill Pavlak, Colonial Williamsburg’s master cabinetmaker, showed her how to use a Roubo saw. The 4-foot long, two-person saw is named after an 18th-century French writer, J. A. Roubo, who illustrated its use. Maintaining a straight, clean cut requires a great deal of skill and physical labor.
“I saw it hanging on his wall and asked him to show me how he used it,” Briggs said. “Will I use a Roubo saw all the time? No. But should a situation come up, I know how to use it.”
Pavlak, too, enjoyed the time they spent together.
“Our goal in sharing the past is not to bring people backward in time,” he said, “but to give them ideas to adapt and carry forward in new ways. It was great having Anne in the shop because she is such an enthusiastic proponent of integrating preindustrial tools, techniques and design ideas into modern craft practices. She’s also a fellow traveler in doing this work in a very public way, so it was nice to swap stories and exchange ideas.”
Finding Inspiration
Among the first products available with the Craft & Forge brand is a bedding collection from Taylor Linens drawing on designs and fabrics from the past.
At Charleston Forge, a North Carolina manufacturer, a single shape became an artful design feature for a new collection of furniture introduced in April at the High Point furniture market. The company’s designers took the bent elbow of a bayonet that Erik Goldstein, Colonial Williamsburg’s senior curator of mechanical arts, numismatics and metals, showed them and reimagined it as a design feature in the entire collection.
“It is a subtle feature,” said Charleston Forge President Dan Minor, “but it tells our customers we are not just building products for the sake of building products, but there is a thought process to take a product to market that has a story behind its creation.”
A second collection from Charleston Forge took inspiration from the artisanship of the gunsmiths to create a unique leg for furniture.
“Colonial Williamsburg has literally thousands of artifacts and great architectural details throughout their properties,” Minor said. “We should be able to utilize their assortment for years to come to create new products that are designed with purpose.”
To learn more about Craft & Forge, go to craftandforgebrand.com/shop. Taylor Linens’ bedding collection is available at Brick & Vine in Williamsburg and at shop.colonialwilliamsburg.com. Anne Briggs’ work can be found at anneofalltrades.com.
Colonial Williamsburg Brands
For more than 80 years, WILLIAMSBURG has worked with a variety of partners to bring a historical perspective to authentic designs of fabrics, housewares, floor coverings and even paint through exploration of colors, textures and patterns.
The newly launched Craft & Forge brand takes its inspiration from Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Trades and Skills, with the goal of inspiring research, preservation and practice of increasingly rare skills from the past.