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CW Journal
: Winter 2004-05 : Wheels and Riding Carts
In the
wheelwright's shop next to the Governor's Palace, from left, vehicle body
specialist Chris Wright, master John Boag, and apprentice Paul Zelesnikar. The
tools and skills are basic, but the work must be precise, "perfect enough,"
Boag says.
Click image to enlarge | 
Boag works on a wheel spoke, which was usually made of oak. Wheels had to bear
travel on unpaved roads and open fields.
Click image to enlarge | 
"Making a piece of wood flat sounds
easy, but actually it is tough to do," apprentice Zelesnikar says.
Click image to enlarge | 
Chris
Wright with folding ruler.
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Phil Moore paints the riding
chair that Wright built for Mount Vernon, which replicates the one built for
Colonial Williamsburg and now in use. View additional photos of the riding chair
Click image to enlarge | 
Wright works on a carriage design.
Click image to enlarge |
text by Ed Crews
photos by Dave Doody
Colonial
Virginia's economy moved in a cart, the simple two-wheeled vehicle that was the
pickup truck of the time. Everybody from the gentry to merchants used carts.
Farmers especially depended on them.
"If you were a farmer in eighteenth-century Virginia, you
couldn't operate without a vehicle. Around here, that vehicle was the cart. So
wheelwrights had a wonderful customer base," said John Boag, master of Colonial
Williamsburg's wheelwright shop.
Given that almost everybody needed carts and thousands were
in use, wheelwrights were as vital in their time as auto mechanics are in ours.
They cut, shaped, and joined wood to make wheels that stood up to rough roads
and rougher fields. Hub, spokes, and rim were wood. An iron tire usually
circled the rim's exterior. Cart wheels were "dished," or bowed out, from the
cart to reduce the strain on the wheels caused by the swaying gait of draft
animals.
Wheelwrights also built and repaired carts. Cart design and
construction were simple. Production required basically the same tools and
techniques as did wheel making. Carts took two basic forms—those with
stationary cargo beds, and dump carts. Dump carts worked like modern dump
trucks. They had a bed that traveled in a horizontal position. By pulling a
pin, the bed could be upended quickly and easily to empty a load. Carts varied
by region and were built for local conditions.
Some wheelwrights also worked on wagons, common on the
frontier, and produced wheelbarrows. They did not make coaches. But they
sometimes worked with craftsmen who produced riding chairs. Boag and
wheelwright's apprentice Paul Zelesnikar follow this practice today. They labor
side-by-side with riding chair maker and vehicle body specialist Chris Wright
in a shop at the Governor's Palace coach house in the Historic Area.
Riding chairs were popular in the 1700s, said Wright, a
former furniture maker. These vehicles typically had two wheels and seated one
or two people.
"Riding chairs were more comfortable than riding on a
horse," Wright said. "In a riding chair, you could move a bit, shift your
weight. You didn't have to sit on the back of a sweaty horse in August." Also,
it was easier on the horse, which didn't have the weight of a human on its
back.
Like furniture making and the wheelwright's trade, Wright's
craft requires woodworking skills and a knowledge of wood, its limitations and
its potential. Wright said that joinery skills were important for making riding
chairs that were comfortable, strong, and reliable. Wright is a self-taught
riding chair maker. Nobody teaches the craft today. He has developed the skill
as a historical detective, deducing vehicle construction by examining surviving
examples.
The wheelwright's shop is large, airy, and bright. Shavings
litter the floor. Hanging on the walls are saws, clamps, files, chisels, and
patterns for felloes, the curved portions of a wheel rim. A drawing of a wheel
is scribed on a wall as a construction aid. A giant wheel with a hand crank
sits along a rear wall. It's used to power a lathe.
Boag, Wright, and Zelesnikar operate the site as a small
urban establishment, meeting the needs of a varied clientele. It was a typical
American arrangement. Only American and English cities like Philadelphia and
London could support big firms with highly specialized workers.
Like all crafts, the wheelwright's was learned through an
apprenticeship. During this training, a young man would pick up basic math and
develop an eye for shaping wood flat or round. Apprentice Zelesnikar said, "The
hardest thing for me is planing. Making a piece of wood flat sounds easy, but
actually it is tough to do. You'd expect that you could make something flat.
But what you see as flat isn't necessarily really flat. You need to develop a
feeling for when you achieve this. You really need to retune your senses."
Craftsman also needed woodworking abilities. Perhaps the
most important was the ability to do quality mortise-and-tenon work. This
involved cutting a cavity—a mortise—in one piece of wood and shaping another
component—a tenon—to fit snugly in the cavity. That's how spokes are secured in
the hub and the rim.
With these skills, an apprentice learned to make a wheel.
Production was straightforward. Workers prepared the wood, then fashioned
parts. Spokes typically were made of oak, felloes of ash, and hubs of elm. Elm
made strong hubs because its grains ran horizontally and vertically. Once made,
parts were assembled into a wheel.
The key to a reliable wheel was the hub. Its face had to be
absolutely flat so that wheel makers could bolt them securely in place for
completion. Cutting the holes in hubs for the spoke also was challenging.
"I concentrate most with apprentices on the hub," Boag said.
"Mortising the hub is the hardest task. The job is to learn what is perfect
enough. The work has to be precise. No matter how perfectly I try to make a
hub, not all the spokes ever seem to fit perfectly."
Although the wheelwrights in Williamsburg demonstrate and
explain the craft carefully, visitors often are puzzled by their work.
"We have one of the hardest trades to explain," Zelesnikar
said. "Our trade is so foreign to visitors because nobody does anything like
this today. Often, the basic concepts are tough to grasp."
But Boag, who has twenty years of experience, said, "You
don't have to be a rocket scientist to do this. You have to learn to be a sound
craftsman. The chief thing an apprentice needed to do was to pay attention to
the master."
Before the yellow detail stripe is added, the detail of the chair is hidden by the continuous green paint.
Click image to enlarge |
Phil Moore's steady hand "pinches out" a yellow trim line to call attention to the detail in the riding chair.
Click image to enlarge |
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The axle, iron riser, and step were all made by the Anderson blacksmith shop for the Windsor riding chair made by Chris Wright for George Washington's Mount Vernon estate south of Washington, D.C.
Click images to enlarge |
Ed Crews
contributed to the summer 2004 journal a story on Revolutionary War
intelligence.
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Historic Triangle