Colonial Homestead

A Learning Center & Tool Shop

At first glance Colonial Homestead in Millersburg, OH, looks like an antique collector’s dream. Thousands of vintage hand tools fill the store. While this ambitious shop may sell antique tools, they will be quick to inform that they don’t consider themselves to be an antique store.

“We would like to be seen as a working shop that also supplies quality hand tools to other artisans,” says Dan Raber. “We promote hand tools as the practical choice for the thousands of people who don’t need or want machines. They don’t want them for the simple reason that motorized devices are used primarily for boring, repetitive work.”

At Colonial Homestead it is common to see people engaged in building or repairing furniture, such as Windsor chairs with hand tools, or cutting joints for a timber frame house, or carving spoons, building flintlock rifles, sharpening saws, making work benches, or quite often sitting comfortably with a book and coffee.

Unlike most businesses, none of the people working at Colonial Homestead are employees. They work on a percentage of a total job or when timber framing, by the joint. Dan encourages the practice of using the extensive reference library to learn. There is also usually a lot of discussion going on about life in general or arguing about the best way of proceeding with a job. Being that there are no engines running in the shop conversations are possible. And there is no dust system since hand planes produce shavings which get used for livestock bedding.

Dan’s primary focus is not on teaching skills, or building products. He says what that they really try to do is change how people think, how they approach life.

According to him, moving from buying to making will change your life. It can be a rather humbling revelation to acknowledge how few hand skills the average modern person has compared to our forefathers. What once were common skills can be reviewed. If you would like to learn more about any traditional skill or simply need tools for your business, farm, homestead, or personal use, feel free to call, write, or stop in.

Colonial Homestead has found, in practice and for a variety of reasons, hand tools are eminently practical for modern use.

• Safer to use.
• Less age restrictions.
• Less space needed.
• No noisy, dusty shop space.
• Less money invested.
• No power source needed.
• Far more personal control of finished product.
• Better quality finished 3 dimensional items.
• Definitely more satisfaction.

Now, most importantly, using hand tools teaches us to care for and respect both our tool and the material. Power tools rely on brute force. The way we work shapes how we relate to people.