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Little Shops of Craftsmen

No job too big or too small for the extraordinarily typical Dominy family

By Michele Ingrassia | Staff Writer

From their little shops on North Main Street in East Hampton, the Dominy family presided over a remarkable domain.

Between 1760, when they opened their doors, and 1840, when the last sales were posted, Nathaniel IV, Nathaniel V and Felix -- father, son and grandson -- turned out 90 clocks and nearly 900 tables, dressers, desks and chairs. They repaired watches and guns, built houses and windmills. On or off the workbench, no job was too big or too small. Nathaniel IV served as a town trustee, inspector of common schools, sealer of weights and measures. Nathaniel V was an overseer of the poor. Early in his career, Felix designed the arm-and-hammer symbol of the New York Mechanics Society; near the end, he covered the dome of the Montauk Lighthouse, using 220 feet of copper sheeting and 1,080 rivets.

Yet what was most extraordinary about this family of clock makers and cabinetmakers was how typical they were. At a time when a new nation was struggling to take hold, craftsmanship -- especially rural craftsmanship -- was about necessity more than art. And craftsmen did whatever else they had to to survive. As Dominy scholar Charles F. Hummel put it, ``If the Dominys had to rely strictly on the production of clocks, they would have starved to death.''

But money is just one measure of success. The Dominys, for all their precarious finances, left a priceless legacy: virtually every tool, every account book, every piece of shop equipment, more than 1,300 pieces in all. Discovered in a Southampton warehouse in 1957, the trove is one of the largest and most complete of the colonial era, and offers researchers an unrivaled look at the day-to-day workings of craftsmen from the peak of the handcraft era in the mid-1700s until its decline in the industrial revolution a century later.

``It was akin to what an Egyptologist would encounter unearthing the tomb of an ancient pharaoh,'' says Hummel, curator emeritus of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Del., where the Dominy workshops have been re-created. ``The survival of so much gives us a wonderful picture of the state of technology throughout the western world, because so much of what the Dominys were doing was similar to what craftsmen were doing in France, Germany and England.''

Although they called them ``manufactories,'' shops like the Dominys' were run on sheer muscle power, aided by simple tools and basic machinery. Large-scale equipment like the great wheel lathe demanded strenuous effort to turn a chair leg or a table base. Yet because craftsmen built towering clock cases one day and repaired delicate watches the next, they also demanded smaller tools. The Dominys amassed a prodigious array, including 37 different planes, 30 different bits and two dozen different files, some acquired from customers who paid their bills with gimlets and saws.

What those tools produced was as straightforward and utilitarian as the equipment itself. Surely the Dominys were worldly enough to understand the blossoming design community beyond East Hampton. But their clients were mostly farmers, who had no need for lavishly carved Philadelphia Chippendale chairs. ``In colonial America and in the new republic, farm people spent money on what kept them in business -- livestock, farm equipment and land, not clocks,'' says Hummel.

Dean Failey, senior director of American furniture and decorative arts at Christie's auction house, says that if any one piece embodies Dominy style, it's the splat-back chair, a simple piece they could produce quickly and in large numbers. Similarly, though Dominy tall clocks are unadorned, there is often a twist -- say, a pewter dial engraved, ``Death don't retreat to improve each beat.''

As the 19th Century faded into a new era of assembly-line technology, handcraftsmen could no longer compete with factories turning out clocks faster and cheaper. But even before then the Dominys were losing ground to entrepreneurs such as Nathan Tinker of Sag Harbor, who opened a warehouse in 1823, shipped in ready-made furniture and advertised that he could supply ``any article of household furniture'' on short notice.

And that might have been the end of the Dominy story -- another craft family felled by time and technology -- except for Connecticut antiques dealer Rockwell Gardiner, who stumbled over some old tools during a 1957 buying trip to Ethel Marsden's shop in Southampton. What Gardiner suspected -- and what Winterthur confirmed -- was a trove of Dominy clock and woodworking tools.

Many had assumed the tools had vanished, if not when the Dominy house was sold in 1939, then surely when it was torn down in 1946 or when the adjoining clock shop was sold. But what Gardiner uncovered was just the first batch.

Robert M. Dominy, a great-grandson of Felix and one of the last Dominys to live in the family homestead, had loaned hundreds more tools to the East Hampton Historical Society in the 1940s and had effectively forgotten about them. But, Dominy said, soon after Winterthur bought the tools in Marsden's shop, he discovered that the East Hampton Historical Society had upped and sold its cache - his cache -- to the museum.

``Someone said they thought I was dead,'' said Dominy, who is 81 and lives in Atlanta. When he showed up with ownership papers, the tools were returned to him and Dominy immediately gave them to Winterthur.

Three years later, Winterthur opened a Dominy wing, with detailed replicas of the Dominy shops, based on drawings made by the 1940 Historic American Buildings Survey and on Dominy family recollections. Just listen to Robert Dominy: ``They put a door in the reconstructed shop, and I said, `It's in the wrong place -- it's four inches out of line.' So they moved it. They said, `If that's the way it was, that's the way it will be.''' For in those details lie the lives of generations of craftsmen.