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After I read Will’s essay for the Nantucket Green Guide, I decided it would work well in our Martha’s Vineyard magazine, but felt I needed some information about scythes on the Island.
I Googled “scythes on Martha’s Vineyard,” and immediately found a picture of Jimmy Cagney using a scythe at his Chilmark farm in the 1950s. Internet gold! After some sleuthing I found the person who owned the rights to the photo (thanks, Dayna!). And read this lovely essay about Cagney (known as one of the Vineyard’s first Hollywood celebrity residents): and his farm. (Find that MV Mag story here.)
Cagney loved the farming life on Martha’s Vineyard, and used a lot of hand tools, but didn’t have much to say about his scythe.
I asked people I thought might know — Rich Couse at Natural Neighbors, Sakiko Isomichi at the MVC — about anyone who might be using a scythe. Neither knew anyone. Coincidentally, I had a meeting the same week with Lucy Grinnan at the Ag Society, so I asked her. “Tim Boland!” she immediately responded.
It turned out Tim had not just one, but many antique scythes to show me, thanks to the tool shed that Polly Hill Arboretum inherited from the Littlefield family. He also loaned me a book called The Tool Book, from which I learned much about tools, and also enjoyed the writing about scythes from a century or so ago: “With their curved blades and sinuous handles, the scythe and its cousin the sickle once looked as much like some exotic shorebird as they did like the masterpieces of the blacksmith’s and joiner’s art. The blades were made of custom-forged metal, made by mixing steel and iron in laminates to get sharpness from the steel and malleability from the iron. A fine scythe or sickle would cut a ribbon in the air, but the blade would dent against a hidden rock instead of breaking.”
I should have known Tim would be the best scythe source: My colleague Leslie Garrett and I often joke that “Tim Boland!” is the answer to any vexations we have involving trees, plants, antique tools, or general knowhow (Tim’s our Climate Champ for this issue). Tim told me that at some point, Polly Hill will have an exhibit of some of these tools, including the long-cloistered Littlefield scythes. Stay tuned.
