Tools of the Trade: The Sellars Collection

This is a story about a large collection of hand tools, the working necessities of craftsmen in many trades, each with its own needs. That’s obvious from the pictures.

But it’s also a story about two individuals, husband and wife, Alan and Louise Sellars, whose interests in fields that few others were paying attention to, led to the creation of two quite different but equally fascinating collections. More later on the other!

The hand tool collection is one of them; it’s a major part of the Funk Heritage Center in Waleska, Georgia. The center also houses exhibits on the story of early Appalachian settlers and Southeastern Indians.

A museum docent in Charlotte put this on a list of suggestions for my short southern road trip, along with several other fascinating stops.

Alan, an Atlanta native, trained as a printer in Nashville, where he met and married Louise Smith, daughter of a railroad engineer. After serving in World War II, studied engineering and went to work for a company in Georgia that was expanding into the apparel industry. While continuing that job, he and Louise also opened a hardware and gift shop, and began roaming country auctions looking things to sell in the gift shop. And that’s where the tools started.

After a visit with an artist friend in Connecticut, they began viewing the assorted tools they had picked up in a new light. Soon there were too many for their home or store counters, and Alan, along with two employees, began creating the artistically arranged exhibit boards you see here; originally they hung on cables from the store ceiling. When Alan Sellars died in 1991, Louise donated the panels to the Funk Center for permanent display.

Sellars was not alone in his fascination with handwork and tools of the past, but the display and the sorting by trade and use may be unique. The Sellars’ friend Eric Sloane built his collection as Americana; at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Henry Chapman Mercer arranged his collection according to a theory of human progress. All interesting ways to connect our past and present!

Some of the trades represented seem obscure to us today: Sashmakers, who fashioned windows and their mechanisms; hurdle-makers whose product was sturdy but temporary and moveable fences to keep sheep and cattle in their places.

Others seem less arcane, including cabinet makers, brush makers and coopers, though we seldom see handwork in their trades anymore; most comes from factories, and in the case of furniture, often in flat packs for home assembly.

For nearly all of the trades represented, measuring tools play a key role. As you can see, the variety of them is immense.

Here’s a set of tools for a familiar but complex trade: the clock and watchmaker. I remember when there were still such craftsmen repairing watches in nearly every town; today there’s hardly a mechanical timepiece to be found, or a good enough one to justify repair.

Here’s another arcane but continuing trade: these tools are for the organ tuner and constructor. Some make subtle adjustments while others are designed to shape and adjust pipes, or clean them.

Tools for printing—Alan Sellars’ original trade and mine!

Art, properly thought of, is also a trade, though a prestigious one. Here, tools for sculptors and painters, including an elaborate set of wooden patterns, squares and curve guides.

And now that we’ve come down to the work of artists, it’s time for word on the Louise and Alan Sellars other big project, mainly led by Louise but with Alan’s enthusiastic backing—the largest collection of art by American woman artists. An interesting article on their work can be found HERE

In twenty-five years of collecting American art, they realized that American women artists had received little recognition apart from a few famous names, although  insufficient recognition, although, they calculated, about 40% of professional artists working between 1850 and 1930 were women.

Margaret Jordan Patterson, Village on the Bay, 1926 / Bernice Evelyn Jamieson, The Card Game, 1940

Their research led to collecting over 600 works in all media by about 360 women from that period that Alan described as “the most neglected in American women’s art history.” After Louise’s death, the collection found a home at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama, which has mounted numbers of exhibitions from the collection, including several that have circulated to smaller regional museums around the country.

Nothing else I can imagine could have put Huntsville on my bucket list, but now it is!