Isaiah Knight bought a little hatchet covered in duct tape at a barn sale in Parsonsfield recently. He wasn’t expecting much when he peeled the tape off, but was surprised to find brass fittings and a hollow handle.
He called longtime local ax collector Howard Hardy, who told him the handle once held a knife that screwed into place. The hatchet was a rare design by John King, an Oakland ax maker, who designed it for Teddy Roosevelt and gave it to the president on a 1902 trip to Maine.
Roosevelt liked it so much he asked King to make more for his sons, according to Knight. There are fewer than 10 of them known to exist; Hardy has one too, knife included.
It’s one of many designs pursued by Maine’s growing community of ax collectors. Maine, and Oakland in particular, was the longstanding capital of ax-making in the country, or perhaps even the world, by different accounts.
Though the modern timber industry relies on mechanical equipment, the axes that powered the early days of Maine forestry haven’t lost their appeal to these collectors. Some restore and use the tools, and a few companies have even brought ax manufacturing back to the state.
There are no known books about the history of ax makers in Maine, according to Knight. Many of the original records that would tell their full stories have vanished.
But it is clear that the Waterville area was a hub of ax manufacturing beginning in the 19th century. About a dozen ax shops there were powered by the Messalonskee Stream and their goods distributed by railroad.
Demand was high: by the 1830s Bangor had become the world’s largest lumber port, with logs driven there down the Penobscot River. Over the next 50-odd years, 8.7 billion board feet shipped from Bangor, according to the Patten Lumbermen’s Museum.
Independent ax shops persisted into the 1960s, when makers sold or closed in the face of new technology and economic forces.
One of the longest-lasting makers, Snow and Nealley, opened in Bangor in 1864 to supply loggers. When it was bought out more than a century later, a college student in Machias purchased its designs from a local store, fearing the company would go out of business.
That was Matt Blackman’s accidental introduction to ax collecting, he said. He got serious about it years later after an injury sidelined him from his boatyard career. Blackman restores axes with a wire wheel and an angle grinder, taking occasional customers, and finds satisfaction in bringing something unusable back into service.
“You fix this ax up, you go out and split your wood for the winter,” he said. “It’s kind of a full circle sort of thing.”
The connection to history is important to him, and axes are a practical interest too: for six years, he’s supplied three-quarters of his family’s heat with wood he split using the tools.
He’s also taught his children to use the axes and split kindling. Blackman has visited their Somesville school to introduce students to the tools, teaching them to strip windblown trees to use for building.
The American axes that make this tree-felling possible are different from the multipurpose designs early settlers brought across the ocean. Maine needed specialized tools for large trees, and more than 300 ax types were made for loggers in the 19th century, according to the Maine Forestry Museum in Rangeley.
Maine makers developed distinctive patterns, like other states. Here, the “Maine Wedge” was thick enough that loggers could hammer on it to get it free from knotty pine wood.
This history was a draw for Knight, who was introduced to Maine axes by a friend four years ago. At one point, Knight had 60; he’s narrowing it down to those produced for a now-defunct Portland hardware store.
He said it’s common for new collectors to find a speciality, searching for particular makers, patterns or even the advertising labels pasted on the ax heads. Collectors are so dedicated that he asked his wife to scope out the Parsonsfield sale while he was at work so no one else would get to the axes first.
“They’re very quick,” he said.
Knight takes an ax camping with him each year, though he doesn’t use them regularly. Many of those who do turn to Nicholas Downing, a southern Maine blacksmith, for restoration.
Like other collectors, Downing grew up around tools. He took industrial arts classes at Winthrop Middle School and got hooked on blacksmithing.
Downing isn’t a collector himself; he enjoys making new axes in northern European styles.
He admires lamination, a method of layering metal that dates back to the Iron Age. It involves putting a high quality steel bit, which can stay sharp, inside softer, tougher steel in the rest of the head.
Many older Maine ax heads were also made in parts like this, he said, and one of his conservation services is “resteeling” them.
Downing also worked with South Portland-based ax manufacturer Brant and Cochran to produce its first ax in 2018. Snow and Nealley has brought production back to Maine recently, too.
Interest in collecting surged during the pandemic, and these new companies have customers. Blackman said prices for older axes have gone up, though interest leveled somewhat in the last year.
The collecting community is active online and meets up at Brant and Cochran each October. Though they’re searching for the same limited supply, there is camaraderie among participants and in the online communities where they connect.
“At the end of the day, it is a tool that’s meant to be used, and that’s what the people who made them wanted,” Blackman said. “They would have wanted them used for 100 years.”
