the green tomahawk of the Rogers Rangers?

[Interested Party]

Originally Posted by kronckew

Looks like a common carpenter's hammer poll hatchet & nail-puller notched blade, painted with whatever paint the owner had on hand at the time. Probably many million of these rusting away in tool boxes around North America and beyond.

Absolutely right Kronckew. Attached are my entry into the rusting carpenters hatchet competition. Officially named a shinglers hatchet. Beside it is a Carpenters shaper called by catalogs a broad hatchet. I guess I learned a regional vocabulary from my family when they were teaching me obsolete trades. Several members of my household when I was young up had grown up on self-sufficient farms where they had even made their own thread to weave into cloth and then dye with natural dyes. Not hippie communes but people who had never lived any other way. It was a good education that has benefited me my whole life as far as what random rusty objects are.

The terminology is getting confusing. Here are two shots from a 1939 Keen Kutter catalog, one from a 1920 Montgomery Ward catalog. These should help clarify the discussion. I left the URL in the edit. Archive.org is an excellent source of factory-made goods, if a little confusing and inefficient in its filters. They have catalogs back to 1767. Incidentally these items cost most of a poor man's wages for a day or more. In Appalachia a lot of workers who were paid in cash still earned $0.15 -20/hr. $0.25 was considered really good wages till the minimum wage was established.

I want to thank the moderators for letting this discussion continue on its natural course. Who knows, maybe we will get a post of a Rogers Rangers hatchet. I always read as a kid that the ax was the number one weapon for poor settlers in the push to and over the Appalachian Mountains. One day I would love to see a post of a homemade short sword that was supposedly used to great effect in the It the dense underbrush of the Carolinas' forest against the British (does this sound reminiscent of Indonesian and Philippino tactics to anyone else). Unfortunately, I fear they were converted back into agricultural tools 200 years ago like it seems the Scottish broad swords that were brought over may have been as well. The next time I am lucky enough to visit my dad I will snap a shot of an old trade spear head that was slightly reforged into a gardening trowel that was my grandfather's favorite for transplanting wildflowers to my grandmother's garden as an example of this phenomenon.