the craft of industrial pattern making
TRANSCRIPT
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The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
The Journal of Modern Craft
Volume 4—Issue 1
March 2011
pp. 27–48DOI:
10.2752/174967811X12949160069018
Reprints available directly rom the publishers
Photocopying permitted by licence only
© Berg 2011
The Craft of IndustrialPatternmaking
Sarah Fayen Scarlett
Sarah Fayen Scarlett is ormer curator at the Chipstone
Foundation, a private organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
that supports scholarship in American decorative arts.
Exhibitions she curated at the Milwaukee Art Museum
explored issues o crat and consumerism across media rom the seventeenth century to the present. Now pursuing a
doctorate at the University o Wisconsin—Madison, she is
investigating the historic domestic architecture and cultural
landscapes o industrial communities.
Abstract
Historians, critics, and artists have recently challenged the
popular perception that things made in industrial actories
and things made by hand exist at opposite ends o the
crat spectrum. This article locates the source o that
misconception in the mid-nineteenth century, and oers
the feld o industrial patternmaking as a provocative
example. Using period manuals, trade magazines, and
the rich collection and archive o an early twentieth-
century industrial pattern shop, this article considers
the relationships o patternmakers to their crat, their
products, and their co-workers to suggest more continuitywith crat traditions than might be expected. Serving as a
touchstone fgure is Charles Rohls, the well-known maker
o “Artistic Furniture,” who could only create his new
identity as a creative individual artisan in the model o the
Arts and Crats movement by denying his earlier career as
an industrial patternmaker and cast-iron stove designer.
Keywords: industrial production, Arts and Cratsmovement, Charles Rohls, embodied knowledge, labor
history.
When Charles Rohls (1853–1936) began making what he
called “Artistic Furniture,” around 1897, he purged rom
his public biography all mention o his work as an industrial
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28 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
patternmaker. He enjoyed great success
in his own day, and is still acclaimed as the
creator o some o the most imaginative
urniture in early twentieth-century America.
His oak chairs, desks, lighting xtures, and
other decorative items deed conventions
o orm and historical precedent, boasting
abstract silhouettes whose fuid organic
lines set them ar outside the mainstream
(Figure 1). Rohls made this unusualurniture in Bualo, New York, working
with a ew employees in a small shop just
as America’s Arts and Crats Movement
was burgeoning. But in his many published
interviews, he never mentioned that he had
learned everything he knew about wood
and tools as a young patternmaker in large
cast-iron stove actories around Manhattan.Despite spending twenty years in and out
o pattern shops, Rohls wrote that he “had
no knowledge o cabinetmaking” beore he
invented “The Rohls Style.”1
Rohls’ denial o his roots in industry
serves as the jumping o point or
this article, which presents the role o
patternmaking in late nineteenth-century iron oundries as a skilled enterprise. This
case study complicates received notions
o the relationship between handcrat and
industrial production. Patternmaking—the
shaping o wood into specied orms, which
were in turn used to make sand molds or
metal casting—was a traditional skill used
or thousands o years. By the nineteenthcentury, it was perormed using the same
tools and materials as other types o
woodworking and was becoming a vital
intermediate step in the replication o cast
metal objects. As the number and output o
American oundries expanded dramatically
in the second hal o the nineteenth century,
Fig 1 Charles Rohls (American, 1853–1936),
Hall Chair, 1904, Oak, 57 × 187/8 × 17 inches.
Milwaukee Art Museum, Git o American
Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in honor o
Glenn Adamson. Photo: Gavin Ashworth ©
American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation.
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Sarah Fayen Scarlett The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking 29
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
Fig 2 Title page rom the catalog o Sherman S. Jewett Company, Bualo, New York,
1890. Rohls may have contributed to the design and manuacturing o this stove.
Collection o Bualo and Erie County Historical Society, used by permission.
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30 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
patternmakers became highly prized skilled
workers within some o the largest actories
in the country. Their knowledge o materials
and precise execution determined the quality
o the oundry’s nal products. In this way,
the traditional crat o woodworking lay at
the heart o industrial iron casting.
This seeming juxtaposition fies in the
ace o our commonly assumed separation
o traditional crats rom industrialproduction, an instinct that may be especially
pronounced in the case o iron oundries,
whose ery urnaces and molten metal have
become quintessential symbols o industry
writ large. It was precisely this perceived
division that drove Rohls to rewrite his
own history. By the 1890s, he could not
sell himsel as an artist or a cratsman in the Arts and Crats mode i he had been
tainted by what had come to be seen as the
mechanical, inhuman infuence o industry.
Despite having moved to Bualo specically
to work or the Sherman S. Jewett company,
one o the largest producers o stoves in
the country at the time (Figure 2), Rohls
instead emphasized his early career as aShakespearian actor. Yet patternmaking was
in act a greatly respected skill that required
a signicant degree o individual creativity,
precision, and intimacy with materials. It
is this irony that makes patternmaking
a useul example to help uncover and
understand ways that traditional crat skills
were reoriented as late nineteenth-century industry grew.
Myths about Making Things in theIndustrial Age
Rohls’ denial o his roots in industry
stemmed in large part rom the anti-modern
sentiments pervading the upper and middle
classes at the end o the nineteenth century.
Over the previous ty years, a war had been
waged and lost to unite the elds o art and
industry. Led in the English-speaking world
by British thinker John Ruskin, who hoped
to raise appreciation among the general
public or the value o artistic labor in all
media, the movement aimed to improve the
quality and perceived beauty o architecture,
domestic interiors, and the built environmentas a whole. Despite having the most
visible platorm o the age, London’s Great
Exhibition o 1851, Ruskin’s eorts ailed. His
ght ended, according to art historian Tim
Barringer, with his deeat in the amous 1878
trial against the artist James Abbott McNeill
Whistler. Ruskin argued that Whistler’s rather
abstract painting Nocturne in Black and Gold:The Falling Rocket (1875) was “a pot o paint
fung in the public’s ace” that did not merit
the high price summoned. The outcome
established that the amount o time spent
making a painting did not correlate directly
to the air market price. This is just one
instance o the Victorian treatment o artistic
work as undamentally dierent rom other work, a conclusion that had in act been in
and out o ashion since the Renaissance. In
the popular imagination, there arose over the
course o the nineteenth century a simplied
but steadast division between things made
by hand and things made by machine.2
This simplied division between art and
industry grew into two mutually supportingmyths about making things. The rst
denigrated actory production. Growing
rom the Aesthetic Movement’s “art or art’s
sake” ideals that deeated Ruskin, this line
o thinking predominated among the upper
and middle classes, who began to see urban
actories and their workorces (largely made
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Sarah Fayen Scarlett The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking 31
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
up o immigrants) as threats to the health
o the dominant culture. As people moved
into trolley-car suburbs and neighborhoods
and away rom coal-ed actories and
shipping yards, they came to regard industrial
production as better kept out o sight, even
i it was necessary to cultural advancement.
This attitude had developed over the
century, as opinion shited rom celebrating
industry and reveling in the heights o humanachievement to criticizing the noise, danger,
and conditions inside the actories.3
The second myth, associated particularly
with the writings o Ruskin and William
Morris, exalted the lone cratsman. In
contrast to devalued actory labor, the
cratsman’s work was held in increasingly
high esteem—but only i it was perormedwithout machines. The best things are made,
this line o thinking went, by one person
working alone in a peaceul setting using
age-old techniques and natural materials.
On to this single heroic gure was projected
nostalgia or a time and place perceived to
be simpler and more natural, in which men
retained power over their own work (andover their culturally dened male identities).
While William Morris’ predilection or
Medieval-style guilds, the revival o handicrat,
and reduction o unnecessary ornament
spread quickly in America around 1900, his
socialist underpinnings did not. Without
this theoretical basis in the dignity o work,
America’s Arts and Crats Movementbecame particularly contradictory, spreading
rhetoric about the morality o “honest”
work while rarely addressing the horrible
realities o most manual labor perormed in
the country.4
Both o these powerul myths—the
denigration o industrial production and the
exaltation o the lone cratsman—rejected
actory settings. These anti-modern
prejudices have deeply infuenced public
thinking about crat, and still underpin the
sentimental preerence or the handmade
today. They have also aected the questions
that historians have asked about the history
o making things in America. Since the
1970s, labor historians have been working
to overcome the misconception thatindustrialization constituted a monolithic
replacement o handwork with automated
machines. In act, they have pointed out, the
shit o master cratsmen and journeymen
into the actory occurred through
numerous complex accommodations
and negotiations worked out between
individuals in the contexts o their particular communities. Dierent people responded
in dierent ways to the vast changes in
technologies and transpor tations that
orever altered market demand, thus
producing multiple and widely varying
industrial revolutions.5
Likewise, historians o design and crat,
as well as makers themselves, have recently been challenging our assumed division
between industry and handwork. Glenn
Adamson’s recent book Thinking through
Crat parses David Pye’s 1968 classic The
Nature and Art o Workmanship, showing
how the British theorist broke down the
moral high ground colonized by Ruskin’s
idea o skill. Instead o assigning value to the perceived talent o a thing’s maker,
which had been closely tied to class and
taste since Ruskin’s time, Pye concentrated
on workmanship. Skill, he argued, derived
rom one’s manipulation o tools—whether
powered by hand, steam, or electricity—
in the management o risk. The level o
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32 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
cratsmanship, then, is not intrinsically tied
to the market value o a thing, but rather
to the risks taken to create it.6 Recently in
the ar t world, many practitioners have been
creating juxtapositions o crat process and
mass-produced objects as a way o showing
the interpenetration o dierent registers
o production. Terese Agnew’s quilt Portrait
o a Textile Worker (2005), or instance, is
collaged rom thousands o labels takenrom mass-produced clothing. It invites
viewers to recognize the invisible crat labor
involved in the contemporary garment
industry.7
Seen in the context o these
increasingly nuanced understandings o
crat, patternmaking emerges as a rich
subplot within the larger story o industrialproduction. Patternmakers oversaw an
intermediate step within large oundry
operations that combined both design
and handcrat. While much o the design
process or the nal metal object lay with
the engineers, and the actual abrication
o the casting took place in the oundry,
patternmakers retained signicant controlover the orm and technical details o
their patterns. And they did their work by
manipulating tools, managing risk, reacting
to the wood, and understanding metal.
In this way, they retained some o the
artisanal autonomy traditionally enjoyed
by cabinetmakers, carpenters, and other
woodworkers. At the same time, however, the hierarchy and specialization that
grew to ulll ever-increasing demand or
oundry products eventually splintered the
patternmaking eld, driving away workers like
Rohls who subscribed to the myth o the
lone cratsman.
The Craft of IndustrialPatternmaking
A general description o patternmaking can
never capture the diversity o individual
work nor provide a ull history o its
industrial development. Rather, the ollowing
discussion oers a selective view through
period proessional manuals, a short-lived
trade magazine called The Patternmaker ,
Rohls’ career, and the historic patternmakingshop at the Calumet & Hecla Foundry
(1904–68), a business venture o a northern
Michigan copper mining company o the
same name. While Calumet & Hecla
operated in the twentieth century instead
o the nineteenth, its patternmakers had
trained in the same methods as earlier rms.
Much o the company site and its recordsare now preserved at the National Park
Service’s Keweenaw National Historical
Park in Calumet, Michigan, which holds
tens o thousands o patterns, a pattern
shop ull o tools, drawings, records, and
an oral history taken rom John Wilson, a
company patternmaker rom 1936 to 1968.
Together this material orms an invaluableresource or understanding the design and
production o wooden patterns as well as
the patternmaker’s role during a time o
great change and reinvention in the history
o American crat.8
The goal o patternmaking was to create
a surace rom which a mold could be made
to cast a metal orm with very particular dimensions. Specications came either
rom the patternmaker himsel (most were
men), or rom an engineer, a proessional
specialization increasingly present in
American industry in the last decades o the
nineteenth century (Figure 3). In this way,
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Sarah Fayen Scarlett The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking 33
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Fig 3 “Anatomy o a Large Pattern,” rom The Patternmaker 1 (March 1904): 26.
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34 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
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patternmaking could t into the category
o making in the “mechanical tradition”
described recently by historian David
McGee. With the “crat tradition,” designer
and cratsperson are one and the same,
whereas designs made in the mechanical
tradition have been worked out on paper
beore being made in actuality. The process
o determining nal orm and dimensions,
known to design historians as cutting andtting, occurs with a pencil and eraser
rather than with chisel and gouge. Generally,
patterns had to be designed this way
because each casting had to t precisely with
other castings. Their orms and dimensions
required pre-planning and could not be
altered easily in reaction to a mistake or a
knot in the wood, as would be the case witha sculptor or a urnituremaker.9
A close examination o the
patternmaker’s job, however, suggests that
more o his work resembled McGee’s “crat
tradition” than might be expected. The
design drawings or blueprints created by
engineers did not prescribe the interior
o the patterns, only their exterior orms. What mattered was the precision o a
pattern’s dimensions and the smoothness o
its nal surace. How that nal surace was
achieved ell entirely to the patternmaker.
In making choices about the construction
o the pattern and how it t into the mold,
patternmakers retained signicant elements
o a creative design process. They workedin standard woodworking shops, using hand
tools as well as those powered by steam and
later electricity, operating in that eedback
loop between mind, hand, and material that
lies at the heart o the crat tradition (Figure
4). While cutting and tting might have lain
in the hands o the engineers, patternmakers
manipulated the designs to accommodate
the casting sequence and went through an
intimate process o trial and error with their
materials. They interacted not only with the
drawing, but also with wood. They also had
to understand metal and collaborate with
the molders, oundrymen, and machinists. At
once designers and cratsmen, they occupied
an intermediate step o production within
the oundry, where their ingenuity amidcountless variables could not be codied
into a xed set o instructions or standard
procedures. In this way, patternmakers
developed what today’s cultural theorists
might call tacit or embodied knowledge.
Their choices in what to make and how to
make it derived rom direct accumulated
experience with wood and metal and thesense perception o their bodily actions. To
study the patternmaker’s process requires
that we acknowledge the links between mind
and body, design and crat, aesthetics and
action.10
Patternmakers designed the interiors
o their patterns with longevity in mind.11 I
patterns contracted or warped with weather and age, they would quickly be rendered
unusable, thus deeating the purpose o
storing patterns at all. So, patternmakers
commonly used a cumulative building-up
o wooden layers to create a shaped mass
(Figures 5a and 5b). The maker laminated
boards one on top o the other, orienting
the grain o each piece perpendicular to thelast. This cross-graining reduced splintering
and warpage. Hide glue, the odorous age-old
adhesive warmed in pattern shops by steam-
powered glue-pot-holders, sucked the boards
together as the patternmaker positioned
and attached them with counter-sunk nails.
Assembly occurred on layout tables that
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Fig 4 Cover, Scientifc American, May 29, 1880. The University o Wisconsin—Madison, Wendt Library.
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36 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
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Figs 5a and 5b Pattern rom Calumet & Hecla Foundry, Calumet, Michigan, 32 in. diam. × 4½ in. Both
sides shown. Courtesy o National Park Service, Keweenaw National Historical Park, Calumet, Michigan,
H3-203. Photo: Tricia Miller.
sat lower than traditional workbenches and
were leveled to ensure precise assembly o
the laminates. Large companies like Allis-
Chalmers, a machine tool manuacturer in
Milwaukee, provided steam-warmed drying
rooms to increase the speed o their patternproduction.12 As a result o this layering
process, nished patterns usually eatured a
striated surace o horizontal seams between
regularly dimensioned stock.
For more complicated orms, traditional
joints helped keep the pattern rom changing
shape too easily. Joshua Rose’s The Pattern
Maker’s Assistant (1878) advised usingdovetails whenever possible, not just or
strength but or their resistance to shape-
change. I using mortise-and-tenon joints,
Rose noted that the mortises should
be graduated to keep the tenons rom
protruding as the wood shited. Tenons
could also be wedged to help keep them
in place and protect the smoothness o the
pattern’s surace.13 At some o the large
oundries, clients could order distinct classes
o patterns depending on the degree o
precision or permanence needed.14 At other
times, the patternmaker decided how useula particular pattern might be to his own
oundry in the uture, and built it either to
last or to be discarded.
Patternmakers in these large oundries
generally worked with white pine, but ideally
they would have chosen cherry or maple,
whose tight-grained suraces would not have
let an imprint in the nal castings. They sometimes used mahogany or castings that
required sharp edges, not only because this
ne wood could be worked precisely but
also because it resisted damage, allowing the
pattern to be used repeatedly. Wood choice,
however, was always a balance between
quality and expense and inexpensive pine,
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which had the added advantage o being sot
and easy to carve, was the most commonly
used wood in industrial patternmaking. At
Calumet & Hecla in northern Michigan,
or instance, the neighboring virgin orests
owned by the company provided high-
quality cheap material.15 Notably in relation
to Charles Rohls, one wood never used
or patternmaking was oak, due to its
pronounced grain and tendency to splinter.Oak’s dramatic gure made it undesirable in
Rohls’ industrial work but inspirational in his
artistic endeavors, a distinction that probably
helped him separate these two types o
work in his mind.
Whatever grain or other imperections
remained on the completed pattern’s surace
was smoothed over with sandpaper andlayers o varnish. Shellac, oten tinted with
lampblack or another colorant, was applied
with brushes to create a hard, smooth, and
visually uniorm surace. As a result o their
laminated construction, patterns usually
eatured exposed end grain that could mar
the surace o the nal casting and also
jeopardized the lie o the pattern. Heavy varnish coats prevented the absorption o
moisture, which would cause warpage and
splitting over time. Large pattern shops
might have a specic nishing shop in which
less-skilled employees perormed the nal
sandpapering and varnishing.16
In addition to working with wood in
order to create a precise surace shape andavoid warpage over time, patternmakers
also had to manipulate the prescribed design
to account or the intricacies o the casting
process. Central to patternmaking was an
understanding o the shrinkage o metal
when it is cast. Joshua Rose’s handbook
described the dierent ways that metal
would shrink, depending on the alloy and
the shape o the mold. In general, the metal
that rst hit the cold surace o the inside o
the sand mold would contract. The metal
urther inside the casting would cool more
slowly, contracting at a lower rate. Each
part o the pattern, then, was adjusted to
account or dierent rates o shrinkage.17
To scale up their patterns rom design
drawings, patternmakers used special shrink rules. Because iron generally shrinks by an
eighth-inch per oot, shrink rules calibrated
or iron casting eatured inches that actually
measured an inch and an eighth. Likewise,
shrink rules or steel extended each inch by
a urther quarter-inch, and rules or brass
and aluminum by three-sixteenths o an
inch. Thus a nished pattern matched thedesign drawing when measured with the
appropriate shrink rule but was a raction
larger than the drawing when measured with
a standard ruler.18
While the cooling o metal may have
been complex, it was at least calculable. In
contrast, the precarious process o molding
the sand rom the pattern was unpredictable,adding an element o uncertainty or
which patternmakers also had to account.
Molders surrounded a pattern with specially
ormulated damp sand, packed very tightly
within two halves o a fask or a strapped
wooden box (Figure 6). To remove the
pattern, the worker opened the mold,
inserted a steel rod into the “rapping plate”(which had been strategically installed by
the patternmaker), and hit or “rapped” the
rod. This jolt loosened the sand around
the pattern. The molder then inserted
a threaded rod into the next hole in the
rapping plate with which he pulled out the
pattern.19 This process inevitably shited the
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Fig 6 Molding Diagrams, details rom The Patternmaker 1 (March 1904): 34.
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sand to some degree depending on the
strength o the rapping and the evenness
o the blows. Patternmakers had to predict
these habits o the molders.
In order to accommodate the molding
process, patternmakers built their patterns
with a slight taper, called “drat,” which made
them easier to remove rom the sand.20
Many patterns could not be removed
without ruining the mold and were built inseveral parts. Usually the parts t together
with dowel joints. The top o a split pattern
was called the cope and the bottom the
drat, just like the two halves o the fask. I
hard edges on the pattern might jeopardize
the mold or result in weak areas o the
casting, patternmakers oten sotened
these corners with leather or wax llets.21 The challenge o balancing these variables
was colorully described by a writer in The
Patternmaker in 1904: “I don’t know any
material nearly as unreliable as the stu
[the patternmaker] is expected to trim to a
hairs-breadth [sic]. Wood, wax, and leather
are all very well in their place, but they
have a proanity-provoking way o wriggling that means much worry or all hands rom
oundry to nish.”22
Indeed all hands were required to
wrangle these “wriggling” components
into complex nished molds. For hollow
castings or appendages that were undercut,
patternmakers included specications or
the molding shop. At the Calumet & HeclaFoundry, or instance, patternmakers painted
parts o the pattern yellow to indicate
that a core box needed to be added. The
molders would make these cores out
o sand or another disposable material
and insert them into the mold ater the
original hollow was taken. I making a pipe,
or instance, the sand core created the
hollow interior o the cylinder and could
be removed rom the metal casting once
cooled. Likewise, yellow with red stripes
indicated that a pattern had a loose piece
to be placed separately in the mold, and
yellow with black stripes marked a part
o the pattern that should be stopped o
with sand to keep it rom being part o
the nal casting. Even as patterns werebuilt up rom many laminated pieces in
the pattern shop, they continued to be
altered during the molding process. The
molds combined parts o dierent materials
that oten were not even attached to
one another until seated in the molding
fask. In eect, patterns were never ully
nished, never whole, until in the mold. Thepatternmaker could not nish a pattern
without the collaboration o the molder.23
Collaboration and accommodation directed
the patternmaker’s manipulation o the
prescribed design.
In addition to the molder, the
patternmaker worked closely with the
machinist. All castings had rough edgesand sprue created by the mold seams,
which needed to be removed. But more
oten than not, alterations in the machine
shop were planned ahead and involved the
addition o precise threading or dimensions
unattainable in the primary casting process.
At Calumet & Hecla, patternmakers added
red paint to suraces that required machining.Patternmakers also worked with machinists
to tackle the problems associated with very
large castings. John Wilson remembered a
pipe so sizeable that the pattern was built
two eet too long at the top, so all the
impurities could rise and be machined o.24
Like all patternmakers, he responded to the
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40 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
The Journal o Modern Crat Volume 4—Issue 1—March 2011, pp. 27–48
engineer’s drawing according to the material
realities o the casting process.
The Role of Patternmakers andtheir Patterns
Patternmakers had complex relationships
with their output. Large companies sold
ully assembled machines such as boilers,
locomotives, or heating and cooking stoves,
like the ones Rohls designed at Jewett. Thehands o the patternmakers, however, never
touched those nal products. The cast
pieces were made and assembled down
the line, long ater the patternmakers’ jobs
were done. Many o the characteristics o
the nal iron products, including the strength
o their crystalline structures and the
smoothness o their suraces, depended on the skills o the engineers and oundrymen,
not on the patternmakers. Moreover,
any individual casting that resembled a
particular pattern was lost among the
many—oten thousands—o assembled
pieces. Appreciation o these products
derived rom their overall unction and
smooth running, which depended on, buteectively subsumed, the precision or quality
o individual castings.
Indeed, the casting process itsel was all
about losing the wooden patterns. First the
pattern was rendered as a void. The mold
replicated its orm and surace, creating
a shadow o the pattern but containing
nothing. While the pattern had beenpainstakingly assembled rom many shaped
pieces, the casting was made very quickly
in a single ery moment when the molten
metal fowed into the mold. All the interior
structure o the pattern, its horizontal
laminated layers and vertical seams, was
replaced by an organic fow that hardened
into a complex crystallized solid. In a hot and
seemingly otherworldly process, the sawdust,
ker marks, and visible grain o the pine
were replaced by the invisible ne structure
o hard metal. The metal version o the
pattern’s surace moved on to the machine
shop but the wooden pattern itsel had been
removed completely.
In this way, patternmaking lacked a certain
nality. Not only was the patternmaker’s cratsystematically worked out o the nal metal
casting, but patterns themselves were never
ully completed. The pattern never matched
the given blueprints because it was scaled
up, had drat added, and probably required
some core boxes or stop-os. It was never
as close to the drawing as when it was
seated in the fask with all its appendagesand careully planned additions. And even
then it might not have been close enough,
because castings always required cleaning
up or machining. Even once a casting was
nished, the pattern went into storage to
await another use. Its job was not done, nor
was the patternmaker’s, who might retrieve
the pattern again later and reuse it to ll anew order. Depending on the amount o
time elapsed, the pattern might have changed
shape slightly, requiring repair or alteration.
Patternmaking was a constant negotiation
between what you have now and what
you want next, what you can make at the
moment and what will inevitably change over
time.Seen in another way, i we consider the
nal products o a patternmaker to be the
patterns themselves rather than the cast iron
products, these cratsmen enjoyed unusually
prolonged relationships with their creations.
Companies kept patterns or many years,
which represented a signicant investment
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Fig 7 “Gear Floor in Pattern Storage” at Stilwell-
Bierce & Smith-Vaile Company, Dayton, Ohio,
rom The Patternmaker 1 (April 1904): 44.
o time and skill and unctioned a bit like
intellectual property today. Companies oten
aorded considerable space to their patterns,
building multi-story pattern storage acilities
and developing elaborate cataloging systems
(Figure 7). These relationships, however,
existed entirely within the actory campus,
making them eectively invisible to outside
consumers. In act, the patternmakers were
especially obscured by the complex andopaque casting process, hidden among
their many other more visible collaborators:
engineers, oundrymen, managers, and
production workers. Patternmakers neither
called the shots nor aced the consequences.
This invisibility seems to have been at
the heart o debates that lled the pages o
proessional publications around the turn o the century. Like many skilled proessions,
patternmaking had been undergoing a
steady process o proessionalization in the
nineteenth century. It was taught in training
centers like Brooklyn’s Cooper Union,
where Rohls studied as a teenager. By the
turn o the century, high schools oered
patternmaking as a marketable skill and
patternmakers’ handbooks abounded. Once
employed, patternmakers earned more
than many other oundry workers due to
their education, skill, and importance to the
company’s success. Their location within
the actory campus refected this rank, as
pattern shops tended to appear on upper
foors, which indicated status (though it also took advantage o the light).25 The pattern
shop at Calumet & Hecla was in its own
building made o thick brick walls instead o
the dark rough stone that ormed most o
the other company buildings. Pattern shops,
then, existed ar removed rom the heat
and danger o the urnaces and the casting
foors. This ensured a degree o comort andseparation that removed them physically and
psychologically rom the oundrymen and
their more inernal tasks (Figure 8).
Even so, writers in proessional
publications elt the need to stand up or
patternmaking’s importance. In 1891, Peter S.
Dingey published a patternmaking handbook,
much o which had already appearedin the American Machinist magazine, in
which he explicitly deended his trade.
“[Patternmaking] is oten underrated by a
class o machinists who think that because
a patternmaker is not called upon to work
in iron, and to one-hundredth or one-
thousandth part o an inch, that there is
not much in patternmaking.”
26
He arguedinstead that patternmakers must remain
knowledgeable about all areas o oundry
work, eectively trying to gain respect or
their essential intermediary role. He was
ghting against the tendency o managers to
think o patternmaking as “a necessary evil,”
an epithet explained by another writer as
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Fig 8 “Sawing Bevel Gear Teeth,” rom The Patternmaker 1 (April 1904): 71.
rising rom the patternmakers’ status as “non-
producers.”27
This type o advocacy also appeared in
The Patternmaker . J.D. Homan, associate
proessor o practical machines at Purdue
University, argued that while the ultimate
responsibility or a machine’s success ell to
the designer, “ollowing closely in the line o
responsibility is the patternmaker who takes
the designer’s ideas and gives them orm.”28
Other writers repeatedly stressed the
patternmaker’s vast breadth o knowledge,
rom woodworking to the properties o
metals, math, engineering, and machining.
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Their commentaries celebrated these
cratsmen’s expertise but also demonstrated
the patternmaker’s liminal position between
many dierent areas o the production
system. Their position made them essential,
but let their proessional status ill-dened
and indeterminate.
The Patternmaker itsel suggests a racture
in the proession along these lines (Figure
9). Published or less than two years, themagazine changed its name to Wood Crat
in 1905.29 It retained the same publisher,
in Cleveland, Ohio, but adopted a new
subtitle: “A Journal or All Woodworkers.”
An announcement to this eect on the nal
page o The Patternmaker suggests that this
change would “broaden its eld” and count
among its readers not only patternmakersbut also cabinetmakers and other “expert
workers in wood.” Its description o
uture articles suggests a tentative shit
to include not only technical inormation
or woodworkers in actories, but also
“entertaining articles” or hobbyists. These
were going to include a description o a visit
to Roycrot, the guild-style crat community in East Aurora, New York, now seen as
among the most infuential proponents o
urnituremaking in the Arts and Crats mode;
an “old-time woodworker” recalling his days
as an apprentice in the 1840s; and an expert
discussing timber preservation.
This splintering o o woodworkers rom
the proession o industrial patternmakingseems to echo the trajectory o Charles
Rohls’ own career. A patternmaker’s
position as concealed team player within a
large oundry probably never satised Rohls,
whose dramatic personality had always
hungered or the recognition o authorship.
Even while working or stove actories in
New York and New Jersey he had sought
and received three patents in his own
name.30 More importantly, he had taken time
o to act in traveling theater companies,
garnering him nation-wide critical acclaim
or his oratory skills. While no documentary
evidence hints at the reasons or Rohls’
departure rom the Jewett Stove Company
in Bualo, it seems that his wie, the amous
novelist Anna Katharine Green, couldsupport the amily and both o their artistic
callings. Starting his new lie as the maker
o “Artistic Furniture,” Rohls joined his
wie as a leader in Bualo’s art and culture
scene, where he played the part o an artist
woodworker with his own individual vision.
This break rom industry, made by Rohls
in the 1890s and by The Patternmaker editorsin 1905, was probably motivated in part by
social class. Writers or The Patternmaker had
been white-collar engineers with degrees
rom, or teaching positions at, universities.
Many patternmakers, especially those who
had started their careers in the 1870s as
Rohls had, may have advanced ar enough
in the companies to be dratsmen, engineers,or managers by the end o the century.
Some may have obtained patents as Rohls
had. As the workorce grew, became less
skilled, and oten more oreign-born, many
o these higher-ranking individuals may have
re-envisioned themselves as woodworkers
instead o actory workers, and perhaps
even ound ideological ties with the Arts andCrats movement and social reormers. At
the same time, some o their compatriots
chose alternate identities. Other high-status
patternmakers went on to be engineers
within industry, aligning themselves with
company management. Some lamented the
hierarchy that had reduced the practical
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Fig 9 Cover page o The Patternmaker 1 (May 1904).
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Sarah Fayen Scarlett The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking 45
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knowledge o managers and led to “poor
work and labor trouble” in pattern shops
around the country.31 Still others, perhaps
with dierent political leanings, ounded the
North American Pattern Makers’ League and
joined the union movements.32
Tied up in these class-related social shits
were the myths o making then taking hold
in the country, which turned Rohls and
The Patternmaker editors against industrialproduction. Patternmaking was a crat
process in which one person used long-
practiced skills to manipulate a design. But
it was also just one step mediating between
phases o the casting process. It required
considerable collaboration with other
people and understanding o engineering
and math as well as the properties o metaland sand. It was at once an isolated crat
and the heart o an industry. For American
tastemakers, these characteristics were
increasingly coming to seem incompatible.
On the one hand, the ideal o the lone
cratsman made patternmakers seem too
dependent on others.33 Those seeking
authorship, like Rohls, shunned it. At thesame time, capitalist actory owners seeking
“producers” begrudged the intermediary
role played by these industrial artisans. The
patternmakers could not have pleased
either o these par ties; they were both
removed rom the nal product and
instrumental to its making. The choice
made by Rohls and the publishers o ThePatternmaker to turn against their industrial
roots helped reiy the myths o making
that have surrounded crat in the twentieth
century. They helped to urther conceal
the crat o the patternmaker—with all its
embodied knowledge, design processes,
and collaborative complexity—behind a
preconceived shroud o animosity toward
actory production.
Interestingly, however, a close look at
Rohls’ urniture reveals the persistence o
his patternmaker’s artisanal values. For Rohls,
woodworking was oten a means to an
end, an intermediate step toward the nal
product, much as it was in patternmaking.
His chairs and case pieces seldom eature
traditional joinery. Rather, he tended toassemble boards with screws and conceal
the heads with rough-hewn plugs. This
gave the urniture a rustic hand-made look
without demanding the time and eort
o hand-cut joints. In this way, he created
simply-built wooden canvases or his ar tistic
expression in which the construction
was secondary to the bold, meticulousornament. Likewise, Rohls conceived o his
case pieces much like cast iron stoves. Just
as he had designed stoves as discrete iron
plates assembled into boxes with solder
and ornamental asteners, so did Rohls
assemble desks and chests rom ornamented
boards. This simple construction let him
showcase his organic carved panels and boldsilhouettes.34
Rohls may have pursued this expression
o creative energy in wood to dey the
anonymity o patternmaking. Within the
stove actories, even when Rohls had
advanced to the position o designer, all
traces o his hands’ interactions with wood
had been erased rom the nal products. By contrast, in his urniture, Rohls’ hand and
his eye were ront and center, showcased in
visible chisel marks and the playul shaping
o chair backs. Even in the metal hardware
included as latches, handles, or in his copper
lamps, Rohls oregrounded the action o
his own making. He tended to buy sheet
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metal or wire and hand roll it into decorative
curls. He seems to have avoided cast metal
altogether in order to show o the work o
the maker’s hand directly.
While patternmaking had been about
creating a single paradigm rom which
exact multiple copies were reproduced,
urnituremaking or Rohls was about
presenting his unique vision in a small
suite o equally unique objects. That visionemphasized all the anomalies o wood and
woodworking that he had been taught to
suppress as a patternmaker—he celebrated
wood grain instead o sanding and varnishing
it; he let the trace o his hand instead
o erasing it completely; and he situated
himsel as company gurehead instead o
an anonymous acilitator within a largehierarchy. Rohls’ “Artistic Furniture,” then,
was both reliant on and in direct deance
o his training in industrial production. As in
patternmaking, the joinery in Rohls’ urniture
was a means to an end, but at this point in
his lie his objective was artistic expression in
the late nineteenth-century mode. Like many
others o his generation, Rohls etishizedwood because o its perceived distance rom
industrial production. That distance, however,
had been socially constructed—as Rohls
knew rsthand.
Notes
1 For more on Rohls’ early career in industrial
stovemaking, see Sarah Fayen, “Everything in My Lie Seemed to Point Toward This Work,” in Joseph
Cunningham, The Artistic Furniture o Charles Rohls
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–17;
Michael James, Drama in Design: The Lie and
Work o Charles Rohls (Bualo: The Burcheld
Art Center/Bualo State College Foundation,
1994). I wish to thank Joseph Cunningham and
Bruce Barnes or encouraging me to investigate
Rohls’ patternmaking career as we prepared the
book and exhibition “The Artistic Furniture o Charles Rohls,” co-organized by the Milwaukee
Art Museum, the Chipstone Foundation, and
American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. For
assistance with this article, I wish to thank Glenn
Adamson, Stuart Baird, Jill Casid, Ned Cooke,
George Fayen, Martha Glowacki, Brian Hoduski,
Ann Smart Martin, Tricia Miller, and Timothy
James Scarlett.
2 Tim Barringer, Men At Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London:
Published or The Paul Mellon Centre or Studies
in British Art by Yale University Press, 2005), 313–
21; Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-
Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley:
University o Caliornia Press, 1989), 1–16; T.J.
Jackson Lears, No Place o Grace: Antimodernism
and the Transormation o American Culture,
1880–1920 (Chicago: University o Chicago Press,
1981), 60–96; Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through
Crat (Oxord: Berg, 2007), 70–1.
3 For more on the Aesthetic Movement, see
Doreen Bolger, et al., In Pursuit o Beauty:
Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York:
The Metropolitan Museum o Art; Rizzoli, 1986);
Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America:
Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
4 The standard text about the American Arts and
Crats movement is Wendy Kaplan, “The Art That
is Lie”: The Arts and Crats Movement in America,
1875–1920 (Boston: The Museum o Fine Arts,
Boston; Bulnch Press, Little, Brown and Company,
1987). For a discussion about the meaning o
“handmade” in the turn-o-the-twentieth-century
urniture market, see Edward S. Cooke, Jr., “Arts
and Crats Furniture: Process or Product?” in
The Ideal Home: The History o Twentieth-Century American Crat, 1900–1920 (New York: American
Crat Museum; Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993),
64–76.
5 The landmark argument or a more nuanced
view o industrialization is Raphael Samuel,
“Workshop o the World: Steam Power and
Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain,” History
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Sarah Fayen Scarlett The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking 47
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Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977): 6–72. For a
recent version o the “historical alternatives”approach see Robert B. Kristoerson, Crat
Capitalism: Cratworkers and Early Industrialization
in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840–1872 (Toronto:
University o Toronto Press, 2007). I wish to
thank Timothy James Scarlett or his discussions
o industrial history.
6 Adamson, 69–81; David Pye, The Nature and
Art o Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968), 4–8. For more on the continuities o skill over the centuries in
American urnituremaking see Edward S. Cooke,
Jr., “The Study o American Furniture rom
the Perspective o the Maker,” in Perspectives
in American Furniture, edited by Gerald W. R.
Ward (Winterthur : The Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum, Inc., 1988), 118–19.
7 For more on this quilt see the collections
website o the Museum o Arts and Design,http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/
emuseum.asp.
8 Some o the Calumet & Hecla patternmaking
material is owned by Coppertown USA Mining
Museum in Calumet, Michigan.
9 David McGee, “From Cratsmanship to
Dratsmanship: Naval Architecture and the Three
Traditions o Early Modern Design,” in Technology
and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 1999), 209–36.
10 See or instance George Lako and Mark
Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 1999). Many writers
have used French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s
metaphor o “the old” to link mind and body
in cultural production. See or instance Anna
Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment
in Inormation Aesthetics (Hanover: DartmouthUniversity Press, 2006): 7; and Laura U. Marks,
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
(Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press,
2002): xi.
11 Insights into late nineteenth-century
patternmaking come rom proessional
handbooks published in the period: P.S. [Peter
Spear] Dingey, Machinery Pattern Making:
Containing Full Size Profles o Gear Teeth and Fine Engravings on Full-Page Plates, Illustrating
Manner o Constructing Numerous and Important
Patterns and Core Boxes, second edition, revised
and enlarged (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1891);
Joshua Rose, The Pattern Maker’s Assistant (New
York: D. Van Nostrand, Publisher, 1878); Isaac
McKim Chase, The Art o Pattern-Making (New
York: T. Wiley & Sons, 1903); Horace Traiton
Pureld, Wood Pattern-Making: The Fundamental
Principles o the Art (Ypsilanti, M.I.: The Schar
Tag, Label & Box, Co., 1906). I would also like to
thank Stuart Baird o the Keweenaw National
Historical Park and Coppertown USA Mining
Museum or sharing his knowledge about
patternmaking in the Calumet & Hecla oundry
and pattern shop. Interview with Stuar t Baird,
Calumet, Michigan, March 31, 2010. Thanks go
also to Brian Hoduski, Chie o Museum Services,
National Park Service, Keweenaw NationalHistorical Park, Calumet, Michigan.
12 “Patternshop and Pattern Storage at the West
Allis Plant o the Allis-Chalmers Co.,” The
Patternmaker 1 (March 1904): 1, in the Hathi
Trust Digital Library, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/
mdp.39015010724980 (accessed Fall 2009).
13 Rose, 167–9.
14 See The Patternmaker 1 (March 1904): 9.15 M.J. Golden, “Wood or Patterns,” The
Patternmaker 1 (March 1904): 15, in the Hathi
Trust Digital Library, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/
mdp.39015010724980 (accessed Fall 2009). See
also F.W. Putnam, “Pattern Making or Amateurs:
Something about Suitable Wood,” Amateur Work
3 (1904), available on ChestoBooks.com, http://
chestobooks.com/crats/popular-mechanics/
Amateur-Work-3/Pattern-Making-For-Amateurs-I-Something-about-Suitable-Woo.html (accessed
Fall 2009). Interview with Stuart Baird, March 31,
2010.
16 “Patternshop and Pattern Storage,” 5.
17 Rose, 244–7. See also J.D. Homan, “The
Patternmaker and the Machine Designer,” The
Patternmaker 1 (1904): 29.
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48 The Crat o Industrial Patternmaking Sarah Fayen Scarlett
18 John Wilson, “Pattern Making at Calumet and
Hecla Mining Company,” broadside in thecollection o Coppertown USA Mining Museum,
Calumet, Michigan; Rose, 247.
19 “Patternshop and Pattern Storage,” 5; Wilson, 1;
Baird Interview.
20 Putnam, 1; Wilson, 1; National Park Service,
Keweenaw NHP, Oral History Project
Collection, John Wilson Interview, July 12, 2001,
Kewe_40525, 33; Baird Interview.
21 National Park Service, Wilson Interview, 30.
22 John Drummond, “Shavings,” The Patternmaker 1
(May 1904): 88.
23 Wilson, 1; National Park Service, Wilson
Interview, 12, 13, 32; Dingey, 2–3.
24 Wilson, 1.
25 Dingey, 5.
26 Dingey, 3.
27 Joseph H. Springer, Sr., “Patternmakers, Past and
Present,” in The Patternmaker 1 (August 1904),
216.
28 Homan, 27.
29 This Wood Crat magazine was only published
until 1915 and does not appear to have direct ties to the magazine o the same name published
today.
30 For more on Rohls’ three stove patents see
Fayen, 7–8.
31 Springer, 216.
32 For more on the Pattern Makers’ National
League o North America see their publication,
The Pattern Makers’ Monthly Journal, which beganpublication in 1891 as the Monthly Trade Journal
o the Pattern Makers’ National League o North
America.
33 Further counting against patternmaking amongst
Arts and Crats adherents was the prejudice
against the material o cast iron itsel. In a 1903
publication, W.R. Lethaby railed that “casting
in iron has been so abased and abused that it
is almost dicult to believe that the metal hasanything to oer the ar ts.” Lethaby, “O Cast
Iron,” in Arts and Crats Essays, by Members o the
Arts and Crats Exhibition Society (London: Arts
and Crats Society; Longmans, Green & Co.,
1903), 194.
34 For a previous discussion o the infuence o
patternmaking on the construction o Rohls’
urniture see Fayen, 11–15.