Figure 7. — Tanner's Tools, 1876. From Schultz, The Leather Manufacture in 



the United States. 



for washing, fleshing, hming, beaming, tanning, and drying had 

 been universally the same. What was true of the physical plant 

 was also true of the tanner's tools: so long as the craft persisted 

 as a manual operation, the basic tools — the beam, the fleshing 

 knife, and the tanner's hook — remained unchanged (see figs. 5, 6, 

 and 7). Even the bark mill, tanning's first mechanized accessory, 

 showed little change, and grinding by horsepower continued far 

 into the 19th century. 



Odious, dirty, and no task for an aesthete, tanning as defined in 

 the mid-1 8th century entailed "the preparing of skins or hides in 

 a pit, with tan and water, after the hair has been first taken ofl, 

 by putting the skins into lime-water."'*^ 



To prepare a hide, the tanner practiced four regular operations: 

 first, the preliminary washing, which took about 30 hours to clean 



A New and Complete Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, vol. 4, p. .'!154. 



i8 



