More than 10 years ago, Chris wrote about his visit to the Sampson-White Joiner Shop in Duxbury, Mass. Yesterday, the Secretary of the Interior designated the site as a National Historic Landmark (NHL) (hat tip to Timothy Babalis for this news).
This historic shop, which, according to the National Park System Advisory Board, “is the only known surviving purpose-built, eighteenth-century woodworking shop in its original location and with its fixtures intact,” was, at one point, being used by a private school as storage. Stories like this usually don’t have happy endings.
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According to the 108-page nomination letter, the site meets two NHL criteria: Criterion 1, “for embodying the early American woodworking trades that helped to build the United States” and Criterion 4, “as an exceptional example of an early American joiners’ workshop, a distinct but rarely surviving architectural type.”
Luther Sampson owned the shop from 1785-1795, and Joseph White owned it from 1795-1843. To this day you can still see the shop’s original fixed workbenches which line three walls, tool racks, and more.
Check out photos (including a bench wall pierced with marking awl jab marks, depictions of sailing ships scratched into the walls and elegantly chamfered empty tool racks) and read more about Chris’s 2013 tour of the site with Michael Burry, a restoration carpenter who discovered the shop and Peter Follansbee, here.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Source: lostartpress.com