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Reflections
What's your line of work? Last names once provided the answer : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisWhat's your line of work? Last names once provided the answer
| by Roger Matile
| 2/16/2012
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Author Susan Cooper has written dozens of popular fantasy novels. Danny Glover is a famous movie star. Harry Fuller served for many years back in the 1960s and 1970s as Oswego Village President. Tom Fletcher is a retired Oswego teacher and Kendall County Board member.
What do each of these people have in common? Each has a last name that is descriptive of a trade that has been, mostly, lost in the mists of time.
Once upon a time, even here in Kendall County, individual craftsmen (and women) worked to provide residents with the things they needed to live comfortable lives. Unlike today, people living in the early 19th century did not go to a huge department or hardware store and purchase things like shoes, tools, or other necessary items. Instead, they went to individual craftsmen and women, who in turn, made each item by hand. Hundreds of years before, these craftspeople, working in their specific trades, each had a surname name that described their profession.
The best-known and largest number of these professionals were the smiths. Since there were so many kinds of smiths-coppersmiths, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths to name a few-there is a correspondingly large number of families with the name of Smith.
While blacksmithing is still commercially practiced today, it is a much more limited trade than in the past. Blacksmiths, who worked in black metals (iron and steel), did business in every hamlet and town in the county. They are the ones who made and repaired the tools that built America, as well as more mundane things such as nails, bolts, and hinges that literally held homes and businesses together. But blacksmiths did not shoe horses, mules, and oxen-that job was done by farriers. Today, however, the term blacksmith has come to mean, in common usage, someone who shoes horses. Real blacksmiths, like my friend Tom Korthauer, fix things, make things, and sharpen things.
Alongside the village blacksmith was the village whitesmith. Using the above for guidance, you will probably realize that whitesmiths worked in other than black metals, meaning brass, bronze, and pewter. While blacksmiths worked with hot metal at their forges, whitesmiths often worked with cold metal, making and repairing items including pewter table utensils, cups, and pitchers. Tinsmiths-also called tinners-worked exclusively in sheet tin, making and repairing pitchers, cups, basins, and later on, ductwork for the earliest furnaces.
Another smith, the gunsmith, spent his time making and repairing pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Gunsmiths of the 1700s and early 1800s could make a rifle or pistol from scratch right in their shop, hammer welding barrels from bar steel, carefully making the flintlock, and fashioning fine wooden stocks. They built the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel.
Before guns were widely used, English archers made use of their longbows (made by boyers) that fired cloth-yard length arrows. The arrows were made by fletchers.
Meanwhile, the cooper was busy making barrels, pails, pannikins, piggins, and other wooden containers while using the specialized drawknives, pod augers, and kerfing saws of his trade.
Even coopers specialized, however, and the white cooper, usually found in larger towns, made mostly round grain measures, firkins, sieves, and boxes out of wide stripes of basswood or poplar shaved thin.
Wrights lent their names to a wide variety of skills. Housewrights built, not surprisingly, houses. They were responsible for the framing and all the materials of the shell-the four walls and roof. The inside of the house, the woodwork and built-in cabinets, were finished by carpenters and joiners who, again, worked with specialized tools.
Millwrights were the jack-of-all-trades specialists who not only built the earliest mills, but also were experienced at building dams and the mill machinery. Pioneer millwrights were also, if they were successful, adept businessmen who could operate their mills after they were built. Professionals who only operated mills built by millwrights were known as millers, a trade that has become another common last name.
Wagonwrights, or wainwrights, built wagons and other wheeled horse-drawn vehicles, using the output from the local wheelwright. Of the two-wagons and wheels-wheels were far more complicated to make and good wheelwrights were eagerly sought after by wagon makers.
In order that hides from either wild or domestic animals could be used, they had to be tanned and softened. Hides were tanned by the tanner, a process that dried and chemically preserved the leather. After a hide is tanned, however, it is very stiff (rawhide). In order to make it pliable and give it a good surface finish, the leather had to be processed and softened by the currier.
In order to make clothing, pioneers spun their own wool and flax into woolen and linen yarn. The spinning was often done by older unmarried female family members, thus the term spinster. The yarn was then turned into cloth on the weaver's loom.
After the wool was woven into cloth it had to be fulled to cleanse it of grease and to compact its fibers and raise the nap. At first, this was done at fulling parties where neighbors sat in a circle and stamped on the soap-saturated cloth with their feet. This was neither efficient nor very effective, however, for large-scale wool making. Instead, fullers built and maintained mills that did the work using wooden triphammers powered either by animals or by water.
Shoes were made by the shoemaker, who was called a cordwainer until the early 18th century. Shoes were repaired by the cobbler. And gloves were made by the glover.
Tailors made clothing while chandlers made candles and tinkers repaired metalware such as pails and basins.
The above listed professions, and other traditional crafts have, as you can see, provided the basis for a good percentage of the names even in our 21st century on-line telephone directories. And to me, it is interesting that something as advanced as a computerized phone directory carries clues to the way our culture has developed over the past 400 years.
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