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Thus William Lee wrote in 1778 concerning his plantation in Virginia: "I wish particular attention may be paid to rearing young negroes, and taking care of those grown up, that the number may be increased as much as possible; also putting several of the most promising and ingenious lads apprentices to different trades, such as carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, sawyers, shipwrights, bricklayers, plasterers, shoemakers and blacksmiths; some women should also be taught to weave."
There were, of course, other forms of labor employed in the South, such as the house-servant class, while many of the Negroes on plantations and in Southern cities worked as carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, harness-makers, millwrights, wheelwrights, barbers, tailors, stevedores, etc., etc.; but, as labor classes, they were relatively of slight importance in point of numbers, and as wealth producers, in comparison to the field hand.
Among these are included the tools of carpenters, coopers, gardeners, butchers, glaziers, farriers, saddlers, tinmen, shoemakers, weavers, wheelwrights, as well as corkscrews, sugar- tongs, sugar-nippers, boot-hooks, button-hooks, door-scrapers, calipers, printing-irons, dog-collars, chains, whistles, tinderboxes, and tobacco- stoppers.
Old master carried the keys of all store houses; measured out the allowance for each slave at the end of every month; superintended the storing of all goods brought to the plantation; dealt out the raw material to all the handicraftsmen; shipped the grain, tobacco, and all saleable produce of the plantation to market, and had the general oversight of the coopers' shop, wheelwrights' shop, blacksmiths' shop, and shoemakers' shop.
By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and gleaned at the harvests.
Without the assistance of some artificers, indeed, the cultivation of land cannot be carried on, but with great inconveniency and continual interruption. Smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights and ploughwrights, masons and bricklayers, tanners, shoemakers, and tailors, are people whose service the farmer has frequent occasion for.
Homes for several families must be built on the six farms; there was a vast quantity of land to be broken up; the work called for laborers. Wheelwrights, drainmakers, journeymen, and laborers of all kinds flocked in. The road to Grenoble was covered with carts that came and went. All the countryside was astir.
Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths, cotton and wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers, printers, and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in 1811, and by the next year the pork-packing business was thoroughly established. Louisville, the "Little Falls" of the West, was the entrepot of the Blue Grass region.
So perfectly, indeed, does it answer that no iron plough has yet been invented that can beat it, and while the valleys and plains are now almost wholly worked with factory-made ploughs, the South Downs are cultivated with the ploughs made in the villages by the wheelwrights. A wheelwright is generally regularly employed by two or three farms, which keep him in constant work.
"After all," said Miss Bentley, after a pause, "I suppose everybody's money had to be made somehow, in the first instance. I suppose all the Millers in the world came from real millers once; and the Wheelrights from wheelwrights." "And what a world of smiths there must have been first and last," said Miss Lansing. "The world is full of their descendants."
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