How to Run a Plane Factory in 1853 (It Was Surprisingly Complicated)

Plus, the wooden plane song and Inuit planes from the Canadian subarctic

“Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either.” — Margaret Atwood (2012)

Underhill Rose performs "Wooden Plane" on The Woodwright's Shop. "I just wanna have a wooden plane/Something simple just to smooth the grain/Nice strike button with a well-fit wedge/Beech wood body and real sharp edge..."

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An ebony Greenfield plow plane for sale at Jim Bode Tools. Greenfield made only 22 handled ebony plows between 1853 and 1854.

The Greenfield Tool Company, one of the largest planemakers of the 1800s, was born from ashes. After the Conway Tool factory in western Massachusetts burned down in July 1851, its company directors quickly reincorporated as the Greenfield Tool Co. Construction on a new factory started a month after the fire. Two years later, the firm was producing about 10,000 planes a month.

But running a plane making factory wasn't as simple as "buy wood, make planes, sell planes." A company ledger dating from April 1, 1853 to Nov. 30, 1854 shows Greenfield scrambling to orchestrate complex trades and transactions with its suppliers, employees, and customers.¹

While Greenfield obtained much of its timber from small farms around western Massachusetts, the company also bought hundreds of parts and unfinished plane bodies from regional planemakers. Four hundred fifty bench and molding stocks came from John Edwin Child in September 1852. Abner Kelly sold Greenfield "best plow plates" and plow and filletster stops. In October 1854, Allen Cummings provided 453 jointer, fore, and jack stocks. Cummings then bought linseed oil, nails, and finished planes from Greenfield. Irons came from six main suppliers, including weekly orders from Humphreysville Manufacturing Co. and — via a series of complex financial transactions — almost daily orders from Providence Tool Co.

The Greenfield Tool Company factory in its early years. Offices were located in the front, with a lumber shed, sawmill, steam engine, and railroad siding in the rear. The plane making machinery was run by overhead shafting requiring large 5- and 8-inch-wide belting. The steam engine boiler was fired with wood scraps and slabs from the sawmill.

Greenfield's workers came from local farms as well. All planemakers were paid by the piece, working six days a week, 8-12 hours a day. Work was highly specialized with a journeyman focusing, for instance, only on filletsters, or small bench planes, or even just sash plane arms. Of the approximately 60 planemakers working in 1853, five worked exclusively on plow planes.

Greenfield paid its staff in materials and banknotes. The firm didn't pay employees until they requested it, with workers taking a 5.25% penalty for getting paid in cash. Don and Anne Wing, who discovered the ledger in 1980, think Greenfield was acting as a company store of sorts or that the system was a way for individuals to finance apprenticeships. By 1854, many payments were being made to groups of workers acting like subcontractors. Exact details of how Greenfield paid its staff were likely in a hands book which has not been discovered.

Greenfield’s production, 1853 vs. 1854. Bench planes included coopers jointers, mitre, raising, toothing, and ship-builders razee planes. Molding planes included hollows and rounds, bead, and complex molding planes. Rebating planes included fixed rebate, dado, and filletsters.

Plane production grew about 17% between 1853 and 1854, due in part to increased mechanization in the factory. In later years, Greenfield would ship its planes all over North and South America. In 1853, most of its sales were made via three large East Coast firms that bought planes on consignment.

Despite the huge numbers of planes Greenfield sold during its existence, the company had serious financial problems dating to at least the mid-1870s. An 1881 letter sent to preferred stockholders politely explained the grim status of their investments: "This notice is sent that holders of said stock may not be put to inconvenience in calling with the expectation of its payment." The mortgage on the factory was eventually foreclosed, and in 1883 Greenfield Tool Company was declared insolvent with a little more than $104,000 in debt. The factory was sold at auction and burned to the ground in 1887.²

Don and Anne Wing, who set the standard for wooden plane research in the 1980s and 1990s, had a newsletter/sales catalog called The Mechanicks Workbench. The editors at Early American Planes have compiled several issues.

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Photos: The British Museum

During his travels in northern Canada in the 1890s, the English explorer David Hanbury acquired two wooden planes from the Inuit people he traveled with. In his writings on his travels, Hanbury doesn't say what those specific planes (which are now in The British Museum) were used for, but it may not have been for wood. Hanbury describes how the Inuit would coat the runners of their sleds with a layer of mud and let it freeze: "It is then planed quite smooth, and water is poured on it, which forms a thin sheet of ice on the bottom. It is not the frozen mud which slides so easily over the crushed snow, but this thin layer of ice."³

Did Inuit peoples develop the idea of a plane on their own, or did they learn about it from outside sources? The direct ancestors of modern-day Inuit were in contact with Europeans, starting with the Norse (who were also plane users) about a thousand years ago. But they were also adept toolmakers on their own. Some small groups of Inuit were known for the chisels, knives, arrow heads, and harpoons they made out of locally occurring copper.

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And lastly, here’s a limerick from Plane Talk back in 1978. Francis Nicholson, the first American commercial planemaker, was also the first known 18th century planemaker to switch from using keys to thumbscrews on sliding arm plow planes.

One day Deacon Francis said "Phew,
These confounded keys I eschew,
The holes in the stocks,
Are worse than the pox,
I think I'll just put in a screw."

— Abraham

1. Wing, Don and Anne. "The Workings of a Plane Factory." Mechanicks Workbench, no. 10, 1980.

2. An 1881 letter: Humphrey, Michael. "Ties; Around Greenfield Mass." The Catalog of American Wooden Planes, issue 9, 1993.

The mortgage: Roberts, Kenneth. Wooden Planes in 19th Century America. Ken Roberts Publishing Co., 1978.

3. Hanbury, David. T. Sport And Travel In The Northland Of Canada. Edward Arnold, 1904.