64 ■ POPULAR WOODWORKINGEnd Grain
On a sultry day in September,
1832, thirty-three-year-old Felix
Dominy was perched high above the
rocks of Montauk Point, at the far
eastern tip of Long Island, removing
the copper dome of the Montauk
Lighthouse. The son and grandson
of highly skilled cabinetmakers and
clock makers who ran a small shop in
the nearby village of East Hampton,
Felix had never done this kind of
work before. He was a woodworker—
not a coppersmith. Why was he now
in such a precarious position?
Felix’s story is part of a remark-
able piece of 1960’s scholarship,
With Hammer in Hand, by Charles
F. Hummel, then curator of the
Winterthur Museum, Garden and Li-
brary in Wilmington, Delaware. This
424-page book catalogs the history
of four generations of the Dominy
family through a fi rsthand look at
their journals, ledgers, tools and the
products of their shop. All of these
were preserved by the descendants of
the Dominys and are now, by a great
stroke of good fortune, in Winter-
thur’s care.
The shop itself, basically un-
changed since the death of Felix’s
father in 1852, was dismantled in the
late 1950s and rebuilt inside Winter-
thur. It’s a remarkable sight. Dom-
inated by a lathe that was powered
by a young man cranking a wheel 5'
in diameter, the shop contains three
oak workbenches and dozens of
metalworking and woodworking
tools. Patterns that the Dominy’s
used for making clocks and furniture
hang from the low ceiling.
Felix “must have been desperate
for work” to take on the lighthouse
job, writes Hummel. As a young man,
he had fully expected to carry on his
family’s business. For three genera-
tions, “the Dominys could completewith skill and competence almost
any task their neighbors asked them
to perform.” They had functioned
as “clockmakers, watch and clock
repairers, cabinetmakers, house
and mill carpenters, wheelwrights,
turners, toolmakers, gun repairers,
metalworkers, and surveyors.” But
the world was changing. Fewer neigh-
bors were ordering custom-made
chairs, chests and clocks.
Hummel writes: “The people of
East Hampton Township had begun
to patronize shops in Sag Harbor,
where manufactured goods could be
bought ready-made. Steamboats now
brought goods to Sag Harbor faster
and more cheaply than the sailing
vessels of the 18th century. Sag Har-
bor storekeepers accepted payment
in “country produce and lumber,”
thus competing with at least one
of the business advantages, barter,
enjoyed by the Dominys.”
As Felix riveted the copper sheets
on the lighthouse dome, he must
have paused now and then to watch
those ominous steamboats as they
entered Long Island Sound. He knew
that there was no going back to the
old ways of the craft taught to him by
his grandfather, Nathaniel Dominy
IV, and his father, Nathaniel Dominy
V. His father would carry on in the
little shop attached to the family’s
house, but Felix had a restless spirit.
He abandoned his tools, left East
Hampton and became a hotel keeper
on Fire Island, one of the outer
barrier islands on the south shore of
Long Island.
Felix’s loss was our gain. His own
son, Nathaniel VII, stayed behind
in East Hampton but didn’t take up
the family business, using the tools
and shop for odd jobs only. The 1798
Dominy house stayed intact for 100
years after the death of Nathaniel V.When it was partly demolished in
1946, its two shops—one for wood-
working, the other for clockmaking
—were moved to a local family’s
beach property and converted into a
clubhouse. The Dominy tools were
later discovered in a local antique
store and acquired by Winterthur,
along with both of the shops.
Hummel spent almost 10 years
researching this windfall —his book
was fi rst published in 1968. Reading
it immerses you in a world com-
pletely diff erent from ours, where
the word “craft” simply meant a
trade, learned through apprentice-
ship, that was primarily practiced
to put food on the table. You begin
to ask questions about Felix and his
father, Nathaniel V, that aren’t easy
to answer. Did Nathaniel also see his
world slipping away? Did Felix mourn
the loss of his workshop life in East
Hampton? What was it like to see
your craft, your art, succumbing to
forces beyond your control?
The book’s title, With Hammer
in Hand, refers to the motto of the
New York Mechanics Society: “By
Hammer & Hand, all Arts do stand.”
Felix was fond of drawing small
sketches of a mechanic’s hand hold-
ing a hammer upright —a symbol
the Society used on its membership
certifi cates. Hummel closes his pref-
ace by writing, “It is hoped that this
book can re-create the Dominy’s
arts and make them stand again.”
And that’s up to us. PWTom Caspar is the former editor of
American Woodworker and Wood-
work magazines.Turnabout
By Tom Caspar
Learning from the past can secure our future.