Axe History RSS

The chainsaw became common in the 1960s. Before that, for roughly three hundred and fifty years of American settlement and expansion, every tree that came down in this country came down by hand. The axe was not one tool among many. It was the tool. The thing that cleared the land, built the cabins, heated the homes, and fed the fires that kept families alive through the winters. You cannot understand American history without understanding the axe, and you cannot understand the axe without understanding what America asked of it. The Tool That Arrived First European settlers brought axes to...

Some tools exist because someone sat down with a problem and an engineering solution. The Pulaski axe exists because a man who had spent his whole life in the outdoors found himself in the worst fire in American history, kept his head while the forest burned around him, and later spent the rest of his career figuring out how to prevent it from happening again. The tool named after him has been standard equipment for wildland firefighters for over a century. It is also one of the most useful dual-purpose hand tools anyone working in the woods, on trails, or...

Some vintage axes surface at estate sales and barn cleanouts and look like any other old axe to anyone who does not know what they are holding. Then they end up on the auction block and serious collectors start bidding. The Sager Chemical Axe and the Connecticut pattern are both in that category. If you find one and do not know what you have, this is the article you needed before you walked away. The Sager Chemical Axe The Company The Warren Axe and Tool Company was founded in 1893 in Warren, Pennsylvania by William J. Sager along with family...

If you spend any time in vintage axe communities, you will hear Norlund axes described in terms that get applied to very few American-made tools. "The Cadillac of axes" is the phrase that comes up most often. It is not marketing. It is the consensus of the people who have owned and used them, and it reflects something real about the quality that went into these heads during their production years. Norlund axes were made in Pennsylvania. They were made by skilled workers in a factory with over a century of axe-making behind it. They were sold through mainstream retail...