Farm Tools
This is a set of tools that would have been used by a worker on a farm.
Working the harvest is a time-sensitive task and these tools helped the worker repair the hand tools without needing to return to the barn.
The short-handled hammer would have hung from the worker’s belt and could pound out dings or nicks in the sickle blade on site.
The carved wooden tube had a cover (which is now long gone) and held water. The sharpening stone (a.k.a. a whetstone) hung on the belt against the back (to not hinder the movement of the worker’s arms that would have swung the sickle or scythe.
When the blade needed sharpening, the tube was partially emptied of water and the whetstone, and then vertically pushed into the ground (with the pointed end) so the worker could use both hands for sharpening.
The iron wedge/spike was used to remove stones from the field.
The carved wooden “finger” piece would have fit on the worker’s non-dominant hand (in this case, the right hand), helped the worker gather multiple stems of grain, and cut them with the hand sickle.
This set is unusual because the worker was left-handed. At that time, using one’s left hand was often thought to be “wrong” and the child was trained to use the proper right hand.
The hand sickle for this set is for the left hand to hold.
These types of tools were developed in the Middle Ages. The suspected age of this set is the late 1700s.
