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I Met the First One Last

I Met the First One Last

Bill Coperthwaite (1930-2013)

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Peter Follansbee
Nov 23, 2023
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I Met the First One Last
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This will be another post about my craft genealogy project. If you are first hearing about this, it’s a book I’m working on about the people who taught me woodworking. A mix of memoir, history, how-to, story-telling and more. If you’d like to see the other posts on this subject there’s a search function - I just found it today by clicking the archive tab, then a magnifying glass icon shows up - and I typed in “genealogy” and got all the posts I’ve done so far on the subject. I wanted to check to see if I’m repeating myself yet/too much. Here goes today’s:

Bill Coperthwaite, demonstrating a crooked knife

He’s not really the first and there is no last. Not yet anyway. I didn’t know him well, but I felt lucky to get to know him when I did. But there’s an element of truth in it. In about 2001/2002 while my wife and I were working at the living history museum then called Plimoth Plantation, the museum took on a large project acting as training, consultants and suppliers to a TV program called “Colonial House”. The premise is absurd - create a setting from the past, in this case, early 17th-century New England, stick a bunch of modern people in that setting for 4 months and film them falling apart. Or not. My job was to make 4 house-fulls of furniture for it - my wife was the curator who saw that each house had its necessary stuff - wooden, ceramics, textiles, etc. A number of our friends and colleagues rounded out all the other necessities, building the houses, teaching period skills like cooking, gardening/farming, etc. So my part was easy, I stayed in my then-shop at the museum making stuff. But after it was all over, I was part of the crew that went to the site to begin dismantling it. 

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