Mysteries of Haddonfield's Historic Tools

Don Wallace hasn’t met many tools he doesn’t like. Whether it has a wooden handle worn smooth by years of use, a crisp edge of a cutting tool, or the what’s-it-for factor, he’s out to unpuzzle the intricacies of implements not often in use today. 

Wallace is the curator of what has become a tool safe at the Historical Society of Haddonfield. The area, in the brick-floored basement of Greenfield Hall on Kings Highway, extends for several rooms, with contents displayed mostly by categories of use. 

There’s a wall filled with hanging axes, another of pitch forks, from three prongs to 10. One wall holds a display of cabinet brackets that Wallace says were recovered in 1946 from a ship that went down in the Delaware River in 1715. There’s a whole lot of stuff on the cooperage business, along with bits of ice house memorabilia. Farming tools are present aplenty. So are barbers’ tools.

A corner holds old dentistry tools and a display of pharmaceuticals guaranteed, in their day, to cure everything from flatulence to influenza. There even are implements designed to help ease unmentionable maladies of both men and women. 

With the help of fellow volunteers Don Webb and Bill Pizzi, Wallace keeps the collection clean and in order. The museum is in the process of searching for an Eagle Scout candidate to help catalogue the collection. 

Wallace, who retired from the graphic arts business in 1995, has been supervising the collection since 1996. Some of it came from his own inventory, 3,000 tools he donated to the society. He says he was inspired by Eric Sloane, who documented a wide range of Early American tools and established the Sloan-Stanley Museum in Kent, Conn. Wallace often carries a copy of one of Sloane’s books with him. It’s filled with pen and ink sketches and buffets Wallace’s expertise when he’s differentiating between various kinds of saws and sharpeners. 

The highlight of many of his Saturdays has been flea markets and yard sales where his eyes will twinkle when he spots an implement that is bewildering to the seller. 

“Ladies aren’t into looking around in the cellar,” he said of the members of the Historical Society, even though a large part of the collection includes kitchen collectibles and gadgets. They’re willing to turn the control and inventory over to the trio of tool guys, occasionally using a bit of persuasion to convince them to find a spot for an object that needs temporary storage, like a copper kettle with a 30-inch or so diameter that held a spot of honor at the society’s Halloween events last month. (How they maneuvered it down the steep and narrow stairwell is a mystery to be solved if they haul it back upstairs for a future Halloween event.)

Almost every Haddonfield school child has been through the museum, since a visit is part of the school curriculum. Wagner, who seems to be a man of both patience and humor, says he’d like the school trips lined up for children in seventh grade or higher. The little guys, he says, don’t have the interest and just can’t keep their hands off some items.

“Third graders have no frame of reference for all this, for the trades that were here in town, or the work of a farmer or a logger,” he said.

They’re more interested, he says, in Transformers than in chicken snaggers, yard-long bits of metal with a hook at the end that farmers, or more likely their wives, would use to corral poultry. It didn’t grasp the bird by the foot, but by the neck, and a wall of the museum displays two – one for chickens and one for turkeys.

“We can handle only 10 kids at a time. Most classes are 30, so we do a tour three times,” said Wallace, noting that space is cramped and some of the items could pose a small risk to children who are about table-height. Any item that juts into the walkway, or has a moving part that could be bumped into, is wrapped with yellow tape. 

“Haddonfield was a farming community and the farmer wore many hats,” he says as he stands near a back door into the basement, a door rarely used. Hanging there are many hats, from straw to leather, but the one Wallace puts on first is a yellow plastic construction worker's hard-hat, with two A & W soda cans attached. “Haddonfield is, after all, a dry town,” he says. 

Another interest of Wallace is linking names to occupations.  Beyond the most obvious -- the Coopers and Masons, for example – there are names connected to work assignments not known today. Ledbetters, he says, can be traced to lead beaters, who formed lead pipes for water systems. 

One of the walkways in the basement is constricted by stacks of cedar roofing that was removed from the Hip Roof House. Wallace would like to see a fund-raiser started, selling individual shakes.

The oldest items in the collection are arrowheads that could date back thousands of years. The most interesting isn’t the ice skates that were put on the feet of oxen, or the feather bed fluffer or horn dockers used to remove horns from bulls.

The most interesting item in the basement this day is Dan Wallace.