The hemlock broom was simply a bunch of close-growing, full-foliaged hemlock branches tied tightly together and wound around with hempen twine, "traced," the rhyme says, with a sharply pointed handle, which the boys had shaped and whittled, driven well into the bound portion. This making of brooms for domestic use is but an example of one of the many score of useful domestic and farm articles which were furnished by the natural resources of every wood-lot, adapted by the Yankee jack-knife and a few equally simple tools, of which the gimlet might take the second place.
It was so emphatically a wooden age in colonial days that it seemed almost that there were no hard metals used for any articles which to-day seem so necessarily of metal. Ploughs were of wood, and harrows; cart-wheels were often wholly of wood without tires, though sometimes iron plates called strakes held the felloes together, being fastened to them by long clinch-pins. The dish-turner and cooper were artisans of importance in those days; piggins, noggins, runlets, keelers, firkins, buckets, churns, dye-tubs, cowles, powdering-tubs, were made with chary or no use of metal.
The forests were the wealth of the colonies in more ways than one; and it may be said that they furnished both domestic winter employment and toys for the boys. The New England forests were full of richly varied kinds of wood, suitable for varied uses, with varied qualities--pliability, stiffness, durability, weight, strength; and it is surprising to see how quickly the woods were assigned to fixed uses, even for toys; in every state pop-guns were made from elder; bows and arrows of hemlock; whistles of chestnut or willow.
The Rev. John Pierpont wrote thus of the whittling of his childhood days:--
"The Yankee boy before he's sent to school Well knows the mysteries of that magic tool-- The pocket-knife. To that his wistful eye Turns, while he hears his mother's lullaby. And in the education of the lad, No little part that implement hath had. His pocket-knife to the young whittler brings A growing knowledge of material things, Projectiles, music, and the sculptor's art. His chestnut whistle, and his shingle dart, His elder pop-gun with its hickory rod, Its sharp explosion and rebounding wad, His corn-stalk fiddle, and the deeper tone That murmurs from his pumpkin-leaf trombone Conspire to teach the boy. To these succeed His bow, his arrow of a feathered reed, His windmill raised the passing breeze to win, His water-wheel that turns upon a pin. Thus by his genius and his jack-knife driven Ere long he'll solve you any problem given; Make you a locomotive or a clock, Cut a canal or build a floating dock: Make anything in short for sea or shore, From a child's rattle to a seventy-four. Make it, said I--ay, when he undertakes it, He'll make the thing and make the thing that makes it."