audiobook Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake; 1700-1805 by Barbara Wells Sarudy in History

Description

Thomas Dennis emigrated to America from England in 1663; settling in Ipswich; a Massachusetts village a long day's sail north of Boston. He had apprenticed in joinery; the most common method of making furniture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain; and he became Ipswich's second joiner; setting up shop in the heart of the village. During his lifetime; Dennis won wide renown as an artisan. Today; connoisseurs judge his elaborately carved furniture as among the best produced in seventeenth-century America.Robert Tarule; historian and accomplished craftsman; brilliantly recreates Dennis's world in recounting how he created a single oak chest. Writing as a woodworker himself; Tarule vividly portrays Dennis walking through the woods looking for the right trees; sawing and splitting the wood on site; and working in his shop on the chest―planing; joining; and carving. Dennis inherited a knowledge of wood and woodworking that dated back centuries before he was born; and Tarule traces this tradition from Old World to New. He also depicts the natural and social landscape in which Dennis operated; from the sights; sounds; and smells of colonial Ipswich and its surrounding countryside to the laws that governed his use of trees and his network of personal and professional relationships.Thomas Dennis embodies a world that had begun to disappear even during his lifetime; one that today may seem unimaginably distant. Imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed; The Artisan of Ipswich gives readers a tangible understanding of that distant past.