01396 Franklin E.

Coyne, The Development of the Cooperage Industry in the United States, 1620-1940
(Chicago: Lumber Buyers Publishing Company, 1940).

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Introduction
If long continuation renders a trade venerable and those who follow it honorable, then the cooper, by such
association with the ancient lineage of the wooden barrel, must be the salt of the earth. Barrels were made and
used by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians before the beginnings of recorded history. We read of "a handful of
meal in a barrel" in the days of the early Hebrews, and Elijah used, or least commanded the use of tight barrels for
the drenching of the altar, when he was in controversy with the pretended prophets of Baal.
More than eighteen hundred years ago Pliny, the Roman investigator, who lost his life trying to find out
what made a volcano smoke, tried unsuccessfully to trace the origin of barrel-making. He did discover, however,
that a race of people at the foot of the Alps were familiar with the art of assembling staves to make barrels in his
day.
The construction of the wooden barrel is worked out, not by accidental methods, but along scientific lines
and embodying engineering principles. The principal of the arch, formed by the stave accurately listed or shaped
to conform to a given circle, is the first fundamental in barrel construction. As each stave rests in a set position
and all are bound by external hoop pressure, the entire assembly of staves and heads becomes a compact and single
unit. The staves are so listed that the lines of the joints, when projected toward the center, meet and form a series
of acute angles. Due to this construction, any external impact or shock is automatically transmitted throughout
every unit of material, and the resiliency thus afforded the barrel modifies the force of such impact.
The convenience of vessels made with staves, their simplicity of construction and their durability, together
with the wide range of uses to which they were suited, made the trade of the cooper a very necessary one in the
development of society. The discovery that oak, whose every product is disagreeable to the taste, gave a peculiar
and pleasing flavor to beverages stored in it, gave this wood a prominence in the cooperage world as a receptacle
for the products of the vineyard and still.
The earliest type of barrel probably was the one consisting of a log hollowed out and the end covered with
skins. In the days of the Crusades barrels as we know them were common and were used extensively as containers
for all liquids and for many such commodities as spices, salt, and peppers which were brought to Europe from the
Holy Land.
Since the discovery of gunpowder, the wooden keg has been the only container in which it has been
shipped. Even in comparatively modern times, when the metal hoop has come into use, manufacturers have been
obliged to continue the use of hickory hoops on gunpowder kegs to reduce the danger of sparks. Privateers used
wooden barrels and kegs for rum as well as for tobacco, spice, gold and other things.
The liquor industry would be in a bad way were it not for the existence of the ordinary wooden barrel.
Whisky improves with age as long as it remains in the barrel, but does not age at all in the bottle. The best whisky
is aged in new, white oak charred containers.
There are two classifications into which barrels and kegs logically fall. Tight barrels are carriers of
liquids and slack barrels are used for solids. While the construction of these two types is basically the same, they
differ in detail as to thickness and types of staves, hoops and heading. They are also grouped according to sizes in
commercial classification. In tight cooperage, sizes up to 25 gallons are called kegs, and those from 25 to 60
gallons are called barrels. Those above 60 gallons are known as casks, butts, and hogsheads.
These few recorded facts are merely mentioned to prove that while the manufacturer of tight barrels is a
very ancient trade there has been very little, if any, real improvement made in the details of its construction, which
when considered as a whole, is in reality a work of art, and there is no doubt but that it was a remarkable
achievement for the originators to conceive the form

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in which it is made, and the essential details necessary to make of it the satisfactory container it has proved itself to
be.
When one considers the form of the chime, the opening in the center of the heading joints, the narrow and
satisfactory croze, the arch construction of the body of the barrel, and the method of holding the whole together,
making of it without doubt, the strongest possible container for any product, it makes one marvel at its simplicity

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and perfection, and any real improvement in its construction would be almost an impossibility.
In the Middle Ages, everything that pertained to drinks touched royalty with a tangent, and the royal
fingers were often in the cooperage pie. The title "cooper to his majesty" was a synonym for wealth, prestige and
ease. The jealousies of royalty led to the promulgation of many decrees regulating capacities and designations of
vessels. The size of the container in which the sovereign stored his liquor was an index of how seriously he took
himself. The telepathic suggestion of a "snifter" gave to the haut ton the "pipe", a container twice the size of a
hog=s head; a vessel that was enlarged again to suit the capacities of the satellites of Good Queen Bess, giving us
the "Queen=s Pipe", the culmination of the cooper=s art.
A patriotic Dutchman modeled a vessel of royal dimension and capacity after a plethoric burgomaster, and
gave to the world the "Berliner"; the oval head, a cross-section through the cadaver of a burgher who passed away
full of years and stale beer.
Some European royal personage conceived the idea of what is crystallized in American political argot as
"the whole hog," when he ordered that a vessel containing a quantity "sufficient for a gentleman=s drinking for
one quarter" (three months) should be called and known as a hog=s head.
Export trade in the original thirteen American colonies created a demand for cooperage early in their
history. Unlike most other Colonial industries, it was in no way localized, but rather attained prominence in both
north and south at once. New England rum, Carolina tar and rosin, and Pennsylvania whisky, called for tight
barrel cooperage at an early date, while rice and Virginia tobacco demanded the first American slack barrels.
In the absence of good transportation, stock had to be manufactured where it was used, and the cooper
shop was often the nucleus from which grew many a flourishing town. The cooper was usually a potent factor in
the town=s life; often an arbiter of destiny. Among the early annals of Salem is an account of one Zerubbabel
HOIT, a cooper who was once admonished for "shaving staves" after sunset on Saturday, the same being a "near
violation of the Sabbath Day." His defense was that the day was cloudy and he had no means of knowing that the
sun had set.
The following chapters trace the course of cooperage development in a general way in the United States,
beginning with John ALDEN, a cooper of the Mayflower, to the year 1940.

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[photos]

[CAPTION: . . .] Coopers making whale oil barrels drew more pay than when making the regular run of
cooperage.

Chapter I
OUR ENGLISH HERITAGE
It may be rightfully said that the beginning of the cooperage industry in the United States had its inception
in the colony established by the Pilgrims. Of the one hundred and one persons who made the crossing of the
Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, and of which only thirty-four were grown men, the rest being women and
children, there is the record that one of them, John ALDEN, was a cooper and was hired as such.
Governor BRADFORD, in his history of the Plymouth Colony, refers to him as follows:

"John ALDEN was hired for a cowper, at South-Hampton, where the ship victuled; and being a hopeful
young man, was much desired, but left to his own liking to go or stay when he came here; but he stayed, and
married here."

It is more than probable that others of the original Pilgrims were familiar with the art of coopering, which
had been well established in England since Elizabethean [sic] days, when guilds of English coopers formed an
important part of the trade unions of that time, which saw a vast amount of barrels, casks, kegs, pipes, hogsheads,
and other wooden containers turned out in English cooper shops for use on English ships which scoured every
corner of the known world.
The Mayflower itself was well stocked with stout wooden containers of English oak, in which were packed
or stored supplies of foodstuffs, powder, oils, and other commodities. Heavy iron bands were used for hoops on
these substantial containers, making them, together with their heavy oak staves, objects of considerable weight.
Nearly all of the containers were constructed to hold liquids, and so were classified as "tight" cooperage. When

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they became, after many years of service, unsuitable for liquids, they were used for drystuffs, and became "slack"
containers. They were primarily constructed to endure, and endure they did, being used over and over again for
one commodity after another.
The first containers of New England, together with the few hand tools for keeping them in repair, were
brought from England. These simple tools were those used by the coopers of that dayCa drawing knife for the
shaping of the staves and clamps for fastening them in shape. During their lifetimes in New England, the Pilgrims
themselves became, of necessity, cleavers of timber and fabricators of containers. When the primary need of small
boats for exploring the territory and for bearing small cargoes on the shallow rivers, together with the need of
whale oil for the lamps, were temporarily fulfilled C the one by the hard work of timbering and carpentry and the
other by the fortunate incident of drift whales being washed ashore after storms C subsequent rapid developments
of trade brought about a considerable demand for containers. The most important of these develop-

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ments were growth of a good market for codfish, the profitable enterprise of making rum from molasses and sugar,
and the beginning of trade in naval stores for shipbuilding and maintenance.
Thus, Johnny Puritan, going to take the whale, found much better profit in the codfish, of which he was
able to secure 60,000 in a single month. No phase of potential profit escaped the vigilence [sic] of the early
Massachusetts legislators, whose economic theories were inherited from medieval England. Governor
BRADFORD sent a company to Piscataqua (now Portsmouth) in 1623, to establish a fishery and a plantation. here
the company also erected a salt works to obtain pure salt for the packing and storing of fish. Another fishery was
set us [sic] at Cape Ann, and these enterprises began the great industry which has been called the corner stone of
New England prosperity.
Some of the first ships returning to England from the Pilgrim colony carried back barrels and casks of
salted codfish. In a very short time there was developed a considerable demand for this New England product at
other European ports, and especially those of Spain and Portugal and the Catholic countries of Europe, because of
the fast days decreed by the Church of Rome. What the French peasant thought of the newly discovered New
England delicacy is exemplified in the trite saying of the day: "The codfish is more important than Louis XIV."
From the humble beginning of extracting oil from drift whales for their lamps, the New England colonists
were to see the whale oil industry become, in about 1670, a very profitable undertaking. A cargo from Boston to
Amsterdam in about 1630 included 748 barrels of oil "of New England fishing." A few years later someone
recorded a shipment from Massachusetts of two cargoes of 144 barrels and 152 barrels of whale oil to London.
Nantucket was to become a leading center of whale fishing after the year of 1700, and it was there recorded that 27
barrels of oil were extracted from a yearling whale killed there in 1707.
While most of the first containers for fish and oil were brought from England, the demand for cooperage
products was so great as to cause considerable concern to the Massachusetts legislators. As early as 1631 a man by
the name of GIBBONS started the first sawmill in Piscataqua (Portsmouth). While this mill was largely occupied
with turning out lumber suitable for boat building, a considerable number of bolts from which staves were hewn
were also turned out at this establishment. Water-power furnished the force necessary to operate this mill. Two
other mills were established in New Hampshire a few years later. These mills possessed four saws and were
likewise powered by water. The products of these mills, together with the efforts of the few coopers in

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the colony were unable to meet the ever-increasing demand for barrels, casks, pipes and hogsheads.

Need For Containers

The record of the Governors of Massachusetts reveal that they were in correspondence with cooperage
firms in England "to provide us some staves," in 1642. In the same year the Massachusetts Court ordered that all
vessels of cask used for any liquor, fish, or other commodity should be of London assize, and appointed inspectors
to gauge these vessels and mark them with the gauger=s mark.
The demand for coopers in New England and the relatively high rate of pay for their services soon
brought many adventurous craftsmen in this trade from England. The passage rate from England was established
at 5 English pounds in 1630. Pipe staves at this period were at a premium and were valued at the extraordinary

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price of 18 pounds per thousand in 1639. This price, of course, could not endure, and became lower as the supply
became greater, and it is recorded that barrel staves were valued at 1 pound, 10 shillings in 1694.
At the petition of the coopers, the Court called together in 1645, all those engaged in the cooperage trade
in the various communities, to form a company, and to be invested with the power to regulate affairs of their trade.
By 1648, the coopers of Charleston and Boston had united with the other coopers of New England to form such a
company. This marks the first association of coopers in the United States as well as probably the first labor union.
The production of pipe staves for export to wine-producing countries had become an important business
by 1650. This trade was deemed so important that, in 1647, the Court appointed viewers "to inspect them in all the
towns." A brisk trade had sprung up between Boston and the Western Islands at that time, and a specimen cargo of
1653 shows a shipment of staves valued at 265 English pounds, together with 533 stave "boults" (bolts). One
trader, in recording the sale of his staves, not only notes the fact that his staves were sold, but added
characteristicly [sic], "Blessed be God, well sold."
The Western Islands needed the grain, pork, fish, and other solid food products of the New England
colonists, together with staves and lumber. The plantation at Richmond Island, Maine, as early as 1639, was doing
a vigorous business in staves, fish, beaver, and oils.
When a voyage was made to these Islands, a cooper went with the ship, making the bungs, heads, etc., on
the outward trip, to be set up, together with Taunton staves and Narragansett hoops, into barrels and hogsheads
when port was reached. White oak staves went into rum casks, while red oak staves were used for sugar
hogsheads. Two grades of wooden water casks were also in use at that time, fashioned out of heavy staves. The
ships returned with a cargo of molasses and crude sugar for the distilling plants at Boston and Newport.
It is recorded that one such trading vessel left New England with the following cargo:
"80 hogsheads, 6 barrels and 3 tierces of rum, containing 8,220 gallons; 19 barrels of flour; 4 tierces of
rice; 2 barrels of snuff; 20 barrels of tar; 3 barrels of loaf sugar; 4 barrels of brown sugar; 7 quarter-casks of wine; 1
barrel of coffee; 1 barrel of vinegar; 20 firkins of tallow; 10 barrels of pork; 15 half-barrels of pork; 4 kegs of
pickles; 2 barrels of fish; 1 barrel of hams; 12 casks of bread; 4 casks of tobacco; as well as 3,000 staves, hoops and
heading boards."

Molasses and Rum

Molasses and poor sugar were distilled in Boston and Newport into rum and was in turn traded for slaves.
Rum constituted a staple export to African ports and was traded easily and profitably on the Gold Coast. Newport
alone had 22 still-houses in operation before the year 1700. The quantity of rum produced by New England
distilleries was enormous; Massachusetts alone consumed more than 15,000 hogsheads of molasses annually for
that purpose. Governor HOPKINS

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recorded Rhode Island sent to the Gold Coast annually 18 vessels carrying 18,000 hogsheads of rum. There was
also a considerable domestic market for this product, since those engaged in the fishing and timbering industries
required it to off-set the harsh staple diet of pork and bread.
Shipments of staves and other wood manufactures were moving constantly to England, Spain and
Portugal by the end of the seventeenth century. Ireland was also a considerable market for staves and it is recorded
that two ships laden with barrel staves were dispatched there in 1719. Trade with European ports was much more
prevalent than domestic trade, since most of the ports of Europe and Gibralter were as near, commercially, as
Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. With the latter, Boston traded in woodenware and other products in 1732, while
the first record of stave trade with Philadelphia appears to be in 1755, when the sailing ship Bathias carried a
cargo of 1,500 staves from Philadelphia to Boston.
The making of apple cider was carried on extensively in New England in Colonial days. Cider was a
favorite drink of the colonists and thousands of barrels were required for the annual output of the presses. It is
recorded that one small New England village of 40 families made 3,300 barrels of cider in 1721; while a somewhat
larger community produced 10,000 barrels of this beverage. As early as 1645 the first wines were imported into
the colonies from Spain and Portugal, and it is recorded that English vessels brought in "about 800 butts" of wine
in that year.
Both the production of staves and the fabrication of the wooden containers were carried on entirely by
hand work and with hand tools since there was no cooperage machinery. The staves operator, usually also a

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farmer, cut his timber into bolts in much the same fashion as the small backwoods operator in certain parts of the
South today. With his good sharp axe, and no doubt with his sons keeping a sharp lookout for lurking and often
hostile Indians, the colonist felled the trees, sawed them into short lengths, and hauled them by oxen to his yard or
shed. After they were sufficiently air-dried he would, when not engaged in his farming, hew the staves from the
bolt. Staves for pipes, which held about as much as 2 hogsheads, were easier to fabricate, since they were straight,
while barrel staves had to be hollowed out on one side and "backed" on the other to produce the necessary bilge.
After further storage in the yard or shed, the same oxen hauled them to town to be sold to cooperage firms or stave
traders.
The first successful iron works in the country was at Taunton, Massachusets [sic]. Here, in addition to
iron for ships, a large number of iron hoops was turned out. Later, coiled elm was used for this purpose on some
containers; the wooden hoop becoming known as the New England coiled elm hoop. Narrangansett became a
center of trade in elm hoops.

Naval Stores

All of the English governors highly regarded naval stores and did all they could to develop the production
of this commodity. They sought them directly for the royal navy and for the king=s merchant ships, and saw in
production of naval stores in New England a means of freeing England of her dependence on Sweden and the
Baltic ports for this commodity so essential to the wooden sailing ships of that day. Agents of the king went about
in the forests selecting large pine trees for this purpose and marking them with the broad arrow of the king, which
designated that they were set apart for the king=s service and were not to be cut down by the colonists. The
marking of trees was never popular with the colonists, and although there was a severe penalty attached to the
disregarding of the king=s arrow, there is no record of any penalties being actually enforced, although it was
common knowledge that the "king=s trees" were felled with reckless abandon.
An English statute made it a crime to sell naval stores to the king=s enemies, so trade with Quebec and
Canada fell off during the French and Indian Wars. the statute was also interpreted to include the king=s potential
enemies; or in other words, the colonists were warned to sell naval stores to none except the mother country. A
bounty was granted in 1706 on naval stores exported to England from the American colonies. This stimulated
trade in this commodity to the extent that there were 9,266 barrels of pitch and tar sent to the mother country in the
following year.
One observing Colonial noted, in 1698, that one man, working alone, could produce a barrel of tar per
week in Portsmouth. It sold in North Carolina in that year at 8 shilling, 6 pence per barrelCdelivered at the vessel.
The first tar sent from America to England was apparently not very satisfactory, and it is recorded that it had too
much "burning quality, which consumed the ropes," but the products of 1698 were said to be equal to the best from
Stockholm and New England rosin was as good as the French product.
Large amounts of tar and turpentine were made on the banks of the upper Connecticut river and shipped
through Hartford to Boston in the period from 1696 to 1703. One party, Joseph PARSONS, sent 500 barrels of
turpentine from western New Hampshire during these years.
Turpentine was used extensively as a disinfectant in colonial times. Every ship carried large supplies of it
for the washing of the crew=s quarters. The quarters of slaves on slaving vessels were thoroughly washed daily
with turpentine. From June to December in 1722, Boston shipped 3,312 barrels of this product. After the English
bounty or subsidy on turpentine, the price at Boston rose from 8 shillings per barrel to 15 shillings in 1718. By
1743 the supply began to grow scarce and the price soared to 2 pounds, 5 shillings per barrel.
After about 1760, the supply of pine timber began to diminish in New England, and the center of naval
stores operations was shifted to the Carolinas. Here a crew of red-faced Britishers heated the first pitch-pot near
Cape Fear in 1584 after which the industry followed the slash pine for a thousand miles along the Atlantic and
Gulf coasts. At present the American headquarters of this time-honored industry is in Georgia and Florida.

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Chapter II
YANKEE INGENUITY
Probably no single phase of industrial development has been less publicized than the development of the
cooperage industry in the United States. While the importance of this industry to the early trade of the country was
manifest in the number of wooden containers required for the substantial amount of trade carried on by the

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vigorous and enterprising New Englanders, very little has been recorded of the actual practices of the cooperage
industry of that early date, and it is apparent that the industry was just as much "taken for granted" then as it is
now.
We have seen how the scarcity of coopers and the dearth of well constructed cooperage products was a
matter of grave concern to the early Massachusetts legislators. Men who were coopers by trade engaged in
container fabricating in all of the early American settlements, but in New England their work was regarded of
special importance as a phase of the commerce for which this region became noted.
There were Dutch coopers in New Amsterdam and in early New York, as there were among the Swedes of
Delaware and in the English colony of Jamestown. Mention is especially made of coopers in a tract entitled "A
Perfect Description of Virginia," published in London in 1649, which relates among other things that coopers of
the Jamestown colony lived well there by their arts and labors.
Most of the early American cooper shops were in the nature of back rooms or sheds wherein the cooper
spent his time in turning out barrels, casks, and other wood containers with his simple hand tools. These consisted
of a sort of drawing knife or cooper=s fro, a stave "bucker," clamps and windlass. With these tools the cooper was
able to turn out two or three barrels a day, and he found a ready market for his products. Cooper shops followed
commercial centers and fishing ports where their products were in greatest demand. During the years of the whale
fishing industry in New England, cooperage establishments were usually found near the "trying houses" where the
whale oil was extracted. Whaling vessels always carried a cooper to head the barrels and keep them in repair.

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