a winter's thaw of Yankee whittling boys, bred to "a reverence for wood". Huddled around evening fireplace (while the women spin, knit, sew), they splinter firelight with their dreaming knives, "each ... on the distinct job to which his greatest skill inclined ... fourteen-year-old Reliance, carving a gunstock; closer in, on the dye pot, his ten-year-old brother, Preserved, composing a slingshot (designed for game); farther back ... big Isaac (his father's right-hand man at plowing) ...finishing a chair with rushlight to aid him, and the eldest, Elihu, the difficult, sensitive boy of twenty ... the despair of his robust sixteen-year-old, practical wife -- ... fitting together the carved wood wheels of a clock." Handicraft to sell or barter in the village.

Whittle: scrape: cut: smooth: treenware for table service, tools for barn and field: "hoes, harrows, plows, ... butter paddles, salt mortars, pig troughs, pokes, sled neaps, ax helves (sawn, whittled and scraped with glass), box traps and 'figure 4' traps, flails, cheese hoops, stanchions ...."

Wares to hang from the jangling cart of the peddlar, trading from Champlain to :Florida, his "Yankee notions": cedar dipper, applewood herb mortar, whitewood plates, maple butter paddles, mint mills of applewood, nutmeg boxes; and, especially, the heavy treenware for apple produce (when cider was America's national drink, apple butter the national spread), for whatever "touched apples, according to the old way of thinking, had to be made of wood ... even a nail would ... 'quicken a souring'": apple shovels (maple, poplar, basswood, or tulip), the apple barrow, rake for the pomace (or "cheese") pressed from the apples, "cheese cutter" for cidering, paddle for the apple butter, and stirrers with sassafrass head.

Winter thaw, spring thaw of whittling boys: who had no time to devil (or sugar) the girls? To hear the schoolmaster's complaint against "vindictive Rome, who razed Carthage to the ground, and sowed her under with salt"? Why mourn a dead nation, when you burn to carve out a new one with your wizard knives? forge undreamed devices with your clanging hammers?

• Joseph Jencks (the "Tubal Cain of New England") invented the modern scythe
• "one of the Rossers of Lancaster", the Pennsylvania rifle (later, "the Kentucky rifle")
• improved mariner's quadrant, Thomas Godfrey
• improved theodolite, Roland Houghton.
• Pennsylvania fireplace, lightning rod, bifocal lenses, Benjamin Franklin
• spinning and carding machine, James Davenport
• submarine, David Bushnell
• carding machine, automatic flour mill, high pressure steam engine, steam dredge, Oliver Evans
• nail cutter and header, steel plate engraving, Jacob Perkins
• cotton gin, interchangeable parts, jib, milling machine, Eli Whitney
• screw propeller, multitubular boiler, ocean steamer, ironclad locomotive, John Stevens
• plow moldboard, Thomas Jefferson
• seeder, Eliakim Spooner
• cold rolled copper, Paul Revere
• potato starch process, John Biddis
• marine torpedo, Robert Fulton
• machine for cutting and heading tacks, Jesse Reed
• screw-cutting machine, Abel Stowell
• metal pens, Peregrine Williams
• breech-loading carbine and flintlock, John Hall
• illuminating gas apparatus, David Melville
• power looms, Francis Lowell
• profile (or copy) lathe, steam automobile, Thomas Blanchard
• hand printing press, George Clymer
• iron plow, Jethro Wood
• cook stove, John Conant
• bronze printing, George Newberry;
• typesetter, William Church.

And it was now 1825, the Erie Canal began, John Quincy Adams (lonely patron of the sciences) was President, and a torrent of inventions ensued.

The whittling boys became America's hired men, mechanics, engineers, architects, inventors.

• Ithiel Town, famous for churches, state capitols, also designed a wooden pure lattice-truss bridge, fastened with "trunnels" (tree-nails), so symmetrical it could be inverted, so stable one bridge was moved, whole, downstream and refounded; built, from felled trees beside the river, by local labor in weeks, the covered Town truss bridges adorned rural New England.
• Loammi Baldwin, once colonel in Washington's army, built the Middlesex Canal (Billerica to Boston), precursor of the Erie Canal.
• His son, Loammi Jr., planned many canals, helped plan the vast system of the Boston waterworks, built the great naval dry docks at Charleston, MA and Norfolk, VA. (The son was called "the father of civil engineering in America".)
• Eli Whitney created the concept of mass production for his arms manufacture,
• a model quickly extended by Simeon North (also in arms),
• and by Eli Terry and Seth Thomas in clock-making,
• and Aaron Lufkin Dennison for his Waltham watches.
• Robert Livingston Stevens, son of Colonel John (inventor of the locomotive), dreamed and whittled out the first model of the economical T-rail for railroad tracks, a distinctively American device, saving builders millions of dollars.

Their contemporaries honored these creative men as heroes. Who could predict that America was to transmogrify into another Rome? sowing their America, as if another Carthage, under salt; discarding their memories in yellowed newspapers, out-of-print books?

The barren salt-leached plains lie in torpor for a hundred years, until the cunning grass blades ferret through, threading the soil for trees and flowers to follow. And then, in a sudden winter's thaw, the busy sound:

Whittle: scrape: cut: smooth: new whittling boys splinter sunlight with their wizard knives: carving out a lost America.

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Sources:

• Reverence for Wood, Eric Sloane.
• American Almanac, Eric Sloane.
• Iron Men, Roger Burlingame.
• Yankee Science in the Making, Dirk Struik.)