Think axes are boring? A Paul Smith's prof's book will change your mind
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” That’s a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
Paul Smith's College forestry professor Brett McLeod takes that advice seriously. When I meet up with him in the basement shop of the college's forestry cabin, he teaches me proper sharpening technique. "You go from the heal of the axe to the toe," McLeod says as he hunches over, gliding a stone gently along the axe blade.
"You can spend a lot of time chopping down a tree and doing it ineffectively and slowly," he says, "or you can spend a bit of time sharpening your axe and take down that tree with relative ease."
McLeod even owns what’s known as a Lincoln Axe, from the early 1900s. It, and the quote, are featured in McLeod’s book American Axe: The Tool That Shaped a Continent.
At some point, McLeod says, we lost respect for the humble axe. "We replaced axes with power saws, chain saws, and so the axe became relegated to a spot in the corner of the garage and pulled out when you needed to hit something hard."
As Paul Smith's professor of forestry, McLeod teaches all those ways to fell a tree, but it’s the simple axe - what he calls "a wedge with an edge" - that’s his passion.
"I started collecting axes when I was about five, " he says. "My father had a side gig as an antique dealer, and so he was always scrounging through old barns, and invariably there’d be an old axe head sticking out of the dirt. I started picking these up and cleaning them up and then learned that they were not just old hunks of metal but they had interesting history behind them as well."
McLeod’s book is filled with that history - and beautiful photographs of his collection - from a time when people used axes for survival, for shelter, food, and work. "Axes became status symbols," he says. The Black Raven axe, for example, known as a Cadillac of the axe world, is featured on the book's cover.
"Other axes were just plain jane, no markings whatsoever, purely utilitarian. They were sort of the pick-up truck of the axe world, meant to just get it done," McLeod says.
Other highlights from his collection:
- A bow-tie shaped Sager Chemical axe, perfect for throwing and, because it's stamped with its year of manufacture, perfect for collecting. "Much as folks do vertical collections of wine, where they collect every year, people will do vertical collections of Seger axes, trying to get every year from 1914 on up."
- The more modern, and quite vicious looking, Vermont racing axe, which is specifically designed for competitive lumberjacking. "An axe like this might chop through a 12-inch log in something like 20 to 30 seconds."
- The Canadian beaver patterned broad axe, which is giant and heavy and used for squaring a tree into lumber. "You would move down the log after you had scored it with a traditional felling axe, and move giant, dinner plate-sized slabs from the log to smooth it out."
Axes are no longer relegated to a corner of the garage. ESPN’s Great Outdoor Games brings lumberjack sports to living rooms across the country. 'Urban axe throwing' at bars is a thing.
There’s a chapter in McLeod’s book about that, too. But it’s the humble axes themselves, and McLeod’s passion for them, that really stands out. "How beautiful these really simple objects are," McLeod says. "We’re surrounded by all kinds of stuff, so it’s really easy not to take the time to just look at them, look at how they were made, look at the engravings on them, see where they fit into history."
In agriculture, in housing, in paper-making, in sport. All made possible by a simple wedge with an edge.
