“A Look At the Colonial World Through the Eyes of….”

I am the Cooper. I make barrels for people all around the community. Some of my barrels go as far as Europe. I am 30 years old and a male. I have a wife and one child, who is a boy. When I was a young kid I lived at home learning all of the difficult tasks that my father had mastered. When I was around 20 I became an apprentice to my father and worked very hard to learn how to master my trade. I am not rich but I am not poor. I work on a side part of my house which makes it easy to go to work and come home. At the moment I don’t have an apprentice, but I have only been the master for 3 years so I don’t plan to stop working. After all I do want my son to continue the family way and become a Cooper just like me. I produce the finest barrels in the whole colonie. People wait and wait just to get their hands on my barrels. Most of the people who own my barrels have 7-10 to contain a large amount of their food and tobacco.

Most of my tools were handed down throughout the family, but a couple like my sawinghorse are new because they can brake very easily. Most days I head over to the woodworker because we share many similarities. Both he and I work with wood and use most of the same tools. My workspace is like my home, maybe it feels like that because it is right next to my house. Where I live is connected to my house on a small side wing that could hold 2-3 people working at one time. As I live my life I only have one fear and that is the fear of my son not learning the trade because I couldn’t teach him. And that I failed my family and the trade that was kept within are household. My workshop is mostly quite because of all the hard work that is going into each barrel. The tools can be very expensive and I feel as if the ones my father gave to me are starting to decrease in their ability to do the small jobs that I ask of them to do. I wish my father could see all the great work I am doing, I always knew that I was his favorite out of the 7 children he had.

The other day I had a big conflict with the woodworker. He was saying that cabinets were more important than barrels. Cabinets can not hold food, drink, and tobacco. But they can hold place setting, small amounts of food, that food goes stale easily, and some toys and games. I tried to show him the more important things like food, drink, and tobacco could go in barrels. And after all these are the most important items for a colonial American. I guess that when a man is so engaged in his trade he has a different outlook on what’s more important. Even though he probably knows how magnificent barrels are. I wonder if he will ever think differently. The wood worker and I have many similarities, the tools we use and the objects that we make. But he just thinks differently.