The South Portland Historical Society is excited to have local cooper (an artisan who builds casks) Ed Lutjens provide a cask-making demonstration at its annual meeting on Wednesday, May 24 at 6:30 p.m. in the Casco Bay Wing of the South Portland Community Center.

Admission to this program is free for current historical society members, $20 for non-members. An annual family membership is just $25 and provides free or reduced-price admission to our entire year’s worth of programming. The demonstration will begin following a brief business meeting.

Lutjens is the former owner and operator of the Portland Barrel Company that was based in South Portland. He crafts his casks using historic tools and techniques. The tools Ed uses are unique to the cooper’s trade and he was one of the few remaining artisans in the region with the knowledge to use them.

Over the course of the demonstration, Ed will share some intriguing background information about the historical significance of casks.

“The cooper’s trade in the manufacture of hogshead and tierce shooks was one of the best paid in the towns near the coast. In 1867 there were 263 such shops in the state. As has been explained, the shook was a package of red oak staves and heading, numbered and ready to be set up as a hogshead, a tierce, or a cask when needed.”

– William Hutchinson Rowe

“The Maritime History of Maine”

The crafting of casks was once a major industry in the state of Maine. Today when we think of “barrels” we are really referring to “casks.” A barrel is, in fact, a size of cask. Casks were categorized by their size with a firkin, a 40-liter cask, being the smallest size and a tun, a 1,000-liter cask, being the largest. A barrel was a medium-size cask of 200 liters.

Historically, in English ships, tonnage was not a measure of weight but a measure of volume based on the tun cask. Hence, a 200-ton ship would have had the same volume in its hull as 200 tun casks, or 200,000 liters of volume.

Until the 20th century, most goods were shipped in casks. They could be built for dry goods, such as apples or salted mackerel, or for wet goods, such as wine or brandy. The construction of dry and wet casks is different since the wet cask had to be joined more tightly to keep the liquid from seeping out. A cask used for dry goods is known as a “slack barrel,” a cask designed to hold liquids is known as a “tight barrel.”

The basic components of a cask are the staves, the long pieces of wood fitted together to create the cask body; the headers, the top and bottom of the casks; and the hoops which went around the barrel to maintain its shape. Older casks had hoops made of wood while later casks had hoops made from metal. The process of crafting a cask was labor intensive because each stave had to be hand carved. A master cooper could only produce two casks a day. Today mechanization allows factories to produce casks much more quickly.

Casks are more than just storage vessels. Wood is porous and cask staves harbor living organisms such as bacteria. A pickle barrel, for example, absorbs pickle juice. Once all the pickles have been removed from the cask and a new batch of cucumbers are added, the absorbed pickling juice in the cask’s wooden staves kickstarts the lacto-fermentation process (the process by which bacteria breaks down the sugars in food to form lactic acid) for the next batch.

This is also true of beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages, all of which use the process of fermentation. Casks can also be used to impart flavor into beverages. Coopers char the inside of their casks with fire so the liquid distilled in them will absorb some of the smoky flavor. Casks are also reused for different products. For example, a brewer might use an old whiskey barrel to ferment his beer, thereby imparting some of the smoky whiskey flavor into the beer.

James Hopkinson Hamlen, born in Buxton, in 1824, is credited with opening the first large-scale cooperage firm in the Portland area. When he first arrived in Portland in 1846, he was intrigued by the ships plying the harbor and the cargoes that incoming vessels carried. According to the book “Barrels and Daring” by Patrick C. Dowling:

“He [Hamlen] noted the contents of these cargoes, mainly, molasses, sugar and rum from the British and French West Indies…What intrigued James the most was the manner in which these cargoes were shipped: in wooden containers. Barrels were used to transport sugar; hogsheads held molasses; puncheons carried the rum.”

Hamlen established his business on the land where Hobson’s Wharf would later be located. He did not produce completed casks however. For his business to be profitable overseas, and to save space in shipping, he crafted shooks. Once again, a shook was a cask that was “knocked down,” or broken into its parts. The staves and cask heads took up much less space than an assembled cask. Coopers would then assemble the casks in their final destination. Maine coopers would sometimes travel to the West Indies to assemble the shooks once they arrived in places like Martinique or Cuba.

When consulting local business listings from the 19th and early-20th centuries, one notes that coopers are often also listed as “fish inspectors.” An 1821 regulation in Maine called for the governor to appoint inspectors of fish.

According to Lieutenant Daniel Morris of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the regulations “dictated how fish were packed so as to ensure proper weights and quality of the fish. Each wooden cask had to be constructed of certain woods and dimensions and be branded as to species, weight, size of fish, and quality of the fish. These inspectors were paid by commission as follow; .17 per case, .10 per tierce, .07 per barrel, .04 per ´ barrel, and .02 per box of smoked product and all paid by the seller.” Hence, it seems that some coopers also acted as fish inspectors since their knowledge of cask construction and size would have been essential to making sure that a given cask of fish would have been packed to a uniform weight and to ensure that rot or spoilage did not occur.

Please join us on May 24 to discover more information about this fascinating trade and to witness the cask-making demonstration. The historical society’s brief business meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m., followed by the Ed Lutjens program.

The South Portland Community Center is located at 21 Nelson Road and is handicap accessible. If you are not a current member of the historical society, you can renew your membership or become a member at the event. Please arrive a little early for processing of your membership, as attendance is expected to be high.

The South Portland Historical Society is always enthused to learn more about local trades and businesses. If you have information related to this topic, the society can be reached at 207-767-7299, by email at sphistory04106@gmail.com, or by mail at 55 Bug Light Park, South Portland, ME 04106.

Seth Goldstein is the development director of the South Portland Historical Society and also serves as the director of the society’s Cushing’s Point Museum.

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.