Book Review: A Reverence for Wood

All Things Wood are Good
A Reverence for Wood, Eric Sloane (1965)

Look, man, I’m going to keep this review very short. If you’re familiar with Eric Sloane’s books, you almost surely love Eric Sloane books. If you’re not, you can go read my longer review of his A Museum of Early American Tools published a year before this one.

Reverence is short, beautifully illustrated, totally random, and much beloved. Sloane weaves the story of tearing down an old barn in Warren and all the types of wood that were used for it, how it was built, from where later patches came from, etc… and then into the local forests and the tools used over time to fell them and how other things were properly built back in the day. Sloane’s writing is so good that people who have zero interest in any of the stuff he writes about wind up completing his books. It’s the craziest thing.

The two most interesting things in this book are when Sloane describes local lore – lore that still exists to this very day. I love that when he wrote this in the mid-1960’s, both Dudleytown in Cornwall and the Raggies (generally) in Salisbury were “things,” but easily explained things with absolutely no supernatural, unexplainable, or spooky qualities. Personally, I cannot stand the Dudleytown myth, because fools have rendered a beautiful patch of woods off limits.

CFPA’s Mohawk Trail used to go right through Dudleytown, but because so many morons were going there to see fictional ghosts, they had to reroute it and lop off a big chunk of of the blazed path – a path that was the Appalachian Trail for decades until that was moved for other reasons. Grinds my gears – and Sloane’s too, as he lived nearby and the Dudleytown myth was an annoyance way back then too.

As for the Raggies, Sloane compassionately explains there were merely destitute European immigrants who worked with coal and steel and didn’t speak English. Once the coal and steel industry left northwest Connecticut, they were unemployed and generally unemployable – and got a bad rap as a result. Today, people still use Raggie as a pejorative for anyone local who is an “other” of some sort.

And that’s it. A book about wood, old forests, and building things. It’s cool, I promise.