The Shop | The Shop Down Cedar Lane

What we do...

I guess my attraction to the workshop goes back a few years. Great great great great great grandfather Alexander McIntosh, born about 1724 in Scotland, married Elizabeth in 1749 in Culpepper, Virginia, was in Caswell County, North Carolina during and after the Revolutionary War, and eventually moved with 8 or 9 children, and spouses, and grandchildren to Tennessee County, North Carolina, now Springfield, Tennessee, about 1790.

The first mention of property in Alexander’s 1793 will is concerning his joinery tools. The items listed in his 1799 probate settlement are livestock, simple furniture and kitchen stuff, and his tools: 1 weeding hoe, 1 mattock, 1 falling ax, 1 broad ax, 1 jointer’s bib, 1 moulding plane, 1 quarter auger, 1 tenant (tenon) saw, 1 inshave, 3 or 4 small files, 1 cooper’s rasp, and 1 iron wedge.

Note that his third wish is that Elizabeth’s (he called her Betty) bed of furniture on which she commonly lays, her saddle, and spinning wheel, she is to leave to who she pleases at her death.

He, probably along with his grown children and grands, must have built several log cabins and barns using his tools and with tools that sons and sons in law had brought along from North Carolina to Tennessee.

All of Alexander’s tools would fit in a wooden box, about three and a half feet long, and his shop was inside that first cabin, then maybe a log barn, or a big sycamore or oak tree in the yard…or down a cedar lane.

~ John McIntosh

Unique projects are crafted from wood: I usually use simple pine for benches, a window seat with storage or lockers in a mudroom. Exterior corbels, garden furniture, pergola are western cedar. Imagine weathered barn wood uses!

Iron: interior & exterior handrails, utility and farm accessories.

Copper: lighting fixtures with antique glass, counter tops.

Combine any or all for a kitchen work table, coffee table, or furniture for the barn or shed.