The exhibition "How It Was with Wood" presents, for the first time in such a large number, old tools used by craftsmen like carpenters, joiners or coopers to work with wood and make various objects out of it.

The exhibition "How It Was with Wood" presents, for the first time in such a large number, old tools used by craftsmen like carpenters, joiners or coopers to work with wood and make various objects out of it.

Wood is a raw material with numerous unique properties. Its availability, uncomplicated processing with only a few tools, durability, resistance to external conditions and the beauty of its surface texture make it an almost perfect material.

The variety of ways in which wood has been used over the centuries has given rise to a number of specific professions related to it. The craftsmen practising carpentry, joinery, cooperage and wheelwrighting were the most numerous and most necessary in everyday life. They used both the most common tree species and the rarer ones. They used mainly pine, spruce and oak. Beech, ash, acacia, maple, linden etc. were used for detail work. All craftsmen working with wood had to have knowledge of its characteristics and preparation for production.

Woodworking, aimed at obtaining a smoothed board of specific dimensions from a block of wood, is one of the oldest carpentry skills. It involves hacking and splitting logs with axes, hatchets and punches, smoothing them out with planes and sawing them into planks with saws. The aforementioned tools were usually sufficient to erect any designed building.

With the development of tools for specialised woodworking in the Middle Ages, carpentry became more specialised and thanks to various types of saws and knives in a wooden casing - i.e. hemlocks - carpenters were able to produce technically advanced, structurally strong and aesthetically pleasing furniture and interior elements for buildings.

The skill of making objects of various shapes from wooden staves, known as coopering, was known in the Polish lands as early as the 2nd-3rd century, as evidenced by excavations from the Roman period. The cooper, in addition to tools similar to those used by the carpenter, also used cobblers, a groove cutter and tools for preparing and stretching metal rings. He also used instruments characteristic of carpentry: a frame saw, a circular saw, a hammer, straight and curved planes and a hew.

A wheelwright was a craftesman who specialised in the production of wheels, however, working for the needs of the countryside, he produced multi-purpose carts, as well as agricultural tools; harrows and wooden parts for ploughs and ards. He produced two types of wheels: those with a bent perimeter, made from a single piece of wood, and those with a perimeter that consisted of several separate elements, sections of a circle. In both cases they were spoke wheels with a hub rotating on a fixed axle. The wheelwright used a wheelwright's bench and other specilaised tools in addition to those that were typical of other woodworking craftsmen.

We learn about the archaic nature of wood crafts from the Proto-Slavic nomenclature associated with them. The work of the people engaged in these professions was a significant element in the functioning of local communities for centuries. The former commonness and, indirectly, the esteem of these professions is also evidenced by the popularity of surnames derived from craft professions.

The process of the disappearance of traditional crafts, which began back in the 19th century, accelerated in the 20th century until we began to refer to them as 'vanishing trades'.

Curator, content author: Iwona Karwowska
Cooperation: Małgorzata Kłosińska-Grzechowiak, Agnieszka Słowińska
Photographs: Grzegorz Solecki, Arkadiusz Piętak