A History of the Amateur Woodworking Movement A Decade-by-Decade Narrative of Amateur Woodworking in America From 1900 to 2000 Chapter 5: 1931 - 1940 An Online Book -- Raymond McInnis -- Amateur Woodworker

 

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Chapter 5: 1931-1940 Typical workshop space available to amateur woodworkers

For full text of article, click here: Document 41: Popular Homecraft volume 1, number 1, 1930 "The Growing Popularity of Homecraft Workshops"

 Document 41 is a "first" for a number of considerations:

1. It is in the first article in a newly launched periodical in America directed primarily toward home workshops, with considerable proportion of its pages dedicated to woodworking.

2. This first article celebrates a growing phenomenon, woodworking.

"Recent figures indicate that more than 77,000 power-driven home-workshop outfits are operated in the United States alone, and the number is constantly growing."

 

3. And its gist gives us ample evidence that electrical power has arrived in the homeworkshop. 

"Today he has an electric motor in his little shop and a complete outfit of power-driven ... today, manufacturers have made it possible to install such power-driven tools at very moderate cost."
 

4. The popularity of woodworking crosses class lines. 

"For the fellowship of the homecrafter is broad and democratic. It embraces men and women of all ages and of all degrees of well being, from the very moderately affluent and distinguished—all who have the creative and ;constructive instinct, who like to  'make things' with their own hands."

Other views of workshop space in the 1930s.

Below, in the boxed-text, an editorial writer for Better Homes and Gardens speculates on the meaning of the shift toward workshop space in homes:

THERE has been a tremendous increase in the number of home workshops recently. Pretty soon it won't be enough to have just an old hammer in the garage, a rusty saw in the basement, a plane somewhere in the attic where Jim used it last, and a screwdriver in the grandfather's clock or the rear compartment of the knife-drawer. Ever since I was 4 years old, I've longed for a complete tool-chest, with plenty of bits and files and wood-chisels, all ranged in neat compartments, over the workbench or in a chest. Now it's coming on again. Example is a great prod to hankerings. Source: Editorial note in Better Homes and Gardens, March 1935, page 38

 

The "ideal" nature of these shops were that, "ideal", but not I think widely available, because most people could not afford such luxury. [need more documetation] In the future I will post more photos, from a Master's Thesis written the 1930s, that show amateur woodworkers engaging in many activities during the Depression. The following are two shops located in  basements. On the left is  the Deltagram, October, 1941. On the right below, from Popular Homecraft 1 March-April, 1931, page 513, is another "ideal home shop".

The jpg above comes from Scott Landis' The Workshop Book, a 1991 account of the state-of-the-art in amateur and professional woodworkers' "space". Chapter 2, on "locating" the workshop, gives most attention the garage and the basement. (Permission to use requested.)

Notice that this garage is detached, a condition that, ordinarily, dates it to the pre-WW II era, before the square footage of houses increased dramatically, and before the architectural fashion of designing houses with "attached" (two-car) garages took hold. (I used the qualifying term "ordinarily" above intentionally, because that skylight in the roof definitely dates this structure in the post-WW II era.) Nonetheless, the image truthfully depicts what a detached garage afforded a woodworker. Warm in the summer, freezing in the winter.

Use your imagination and consider this structure as an upscale version of what a workshop in a detached garage would look like the pre-WW II era.

The garage was detached for a good reason. As the Yale economist, Robert J Shiller, notes, data compiled by the US Census Bureau reveals that the average size for "new" houses in the 1940s was 1100 square feet, giving  approx-imately 300 square feet of space per family member. Compared to today -- 2150 square feet, or 800 square feet per family member -- the Depression era included crowded living quarters. In Diamond and Moezzi's graph on the left, we see the upward incline in the square-footage of new houses between 1940 and 2000.

(Source: R Diamond and  M Moezzi  Changing trends: A brief history of the US consumption of energy, water, food, beverages and tobacco   Robert J Shiller, "Long-Term Perspectives on the Current Boom in Home Prices", Economist's Voice March 2006, page 6.)

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