Living Stories: My Father's skill with an axe

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Transcript:

One of the exciting things was getting to go out into the woods with my dad, where he demonstrated one of his skills and that's how to make railroad cross ties. You know, the railroad ties, the wood ones that go under the railroad tracks. That was one of the industries in that area, woodcutting and all those kinds of things. And so my dad and all of his brothers were great woodsmen, in fact, they had when they were boys or younger before my dad got married. He and his other two brothers and my cousin TJ would do that. And they would sell their railroad ties to some guy that would come in and buy them on the railroad.

So I got to go out with my dad, you would have to cut down the tree. They always were made out of pine trees, you'd cut the tree down first. And this was with a handsaw, a cross-cut saw. So it's laying on its side and you're cutting you cut part of the way and then you stop. And then he takes a wedge or an ax and he drives a wedge into the cut with this pine tree because of the oil, I think he had to have a jar that had kerosene and you would put pine needles in the opening of the jar and you would sprinkle it on the saw every so often to keep it from sticking on that pine resin on the tree. And so you'd go you keep sawing and then finally he would it would fall over and then we got to play with the ax.

So with the ax, you could go down and take all of the branches off of it, pull them off to the side, and then he would top it and cut the top out of it. And then he would measure with the ax handle and make these marks on the tree. And then we would go and where that cross-cut saw, and we would cut them into links, railroad tie links, you would cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it, and then after he would cut it, then he would bring in this special ax called a broad ax. And the broad ax had this big old wide blade on it, and he would cut it from round into square. I couldn't do that I could only do the cutting the branches off. But I was so impressed to see my dad doing that and he did it with such mastery. He knew what he was doing.

I call my dad, a renaissance man. I don't think there was anything that he couldn't do. And he would say, “Boy, there is a slight to every job to anything that's hard. If you know the slight, you can do it without even breaking a sweat.” And that was no lie. My dad could make a saw do his bidding and ax, in fact, he taught me how to use the ax. Now I am able to split Eucalyptus wood without even using wedges or mauls.

Image used under CC BY-SA 2.0 CA.

James Banks

Banks Family Group

The Banks and Extended Family Group

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