In the beech woods of England's Chiltern Hills, bodgers lived and worked among the trees, turning chair legs on foot-powered pole lathes and selling them by the gross to the High Wycombe chair factories. Factory turning killed the trade in the twentieth century; Samuel Rockall, commonly counted the last traditional bodger, kept working his woodland shop until his death in 1962.
Chair bodger no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1500 – 1830
Print, precision and the great divide
Printed manuals like Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1678) and pattern books like Chippendale's Director (1754) spread knowledge the guilds once guarded, while the trade split: London's joiners chartered separately in 1571, cabinetmakers courted the wealthy, and shipwrights built the era's most complex machines — HMS Victory consumed roughly six thousand trees.
What else was happening then
1678
The first English trade manual
London printer Joseph Moxon began issuing Mechanick Exercises in monthly parts — the first English-language manual to describe carpentry and joinery technique in print. Until then the trades passed knowledge only by demonstration, guarded inside guild workshops.
1833
The balloon frame, Chicago
St. Mary's Church in Chicago went up with light, machine-sawn studs and cheap machine-made nails instead of heavy mortised timbers — a method skeptics said would blow away like a balloon. It let two men do what had needed a raising crew, and it built the American West.
1924
The portable circular saw
New Orleans inventor Edmond Michel patented a handheld electric circular saw, commercialized through the company that became Skilsaw. Within a generation, hand-sawing framing lumber on site had essentially ended — the single largest productivity jump in the trade's modern history.
1952
The truss plate industrializes the roof
Florida builder A. Carroll Sanford developed the toothed steel connector plate behind the Gang-Nail truss, moving roof framing from skilled site work into factories. Today the overwhelming majority of new American and Australian house roofs arrive as prefabricated trusses on a truck.
Where that work lives now
The builder in wood — a trade older than Homo sapiens, still measuring twice and cutting once from Nara's ancient temples to Norway's timber towers.
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