Asa Sherman

Spouse of Nancy Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Asa Sherman was born in 1781 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and worked for forty years as a carpenter in the mill towns of the Connecticut valley. He married Nancy Faulkner, the milliner of Northampton, in 1807, raised two children with her and died in 1839 at the age of fifty-eight, of old age as the parish record has it, a year before his wife. He was not a hunter and stood outside the Red Ledger's tally, but he belonged to the circle of quiet, practical men on whom the Faulkner line depended, and his furniture, his house frames and one particular staircase are still to be found in the valley. Springfield in the year of his birth was a river town on the east bank of the Connecticut, with a long main street running up from the landing to a rise called Armory Hill, where the Continental Army had set up an arsenal during the Revolution. The armoury brought work and a steady stream of soldiers, smiths and gunmakers, and it left the town with a taste for precise, well-made things. Asa grew up among the sound of hammers. His father, whom the family papers do not name, was a joiner who supplied the armoury with gun stocks, packing cases and workbenches, and the boy was in the shop at six, sanding walnut blanks for musket stocks with a piece of sharkskin. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a master housewright in the next town up the river, and he learned the craft as it was then taught, by doing. First came the sharpening of tools, which took a year. Then he learned to saw, to plane, to bore and to fit, to cut a dovetail that would hold a drawer for a century, to turn a leg on a foot-powered lathe and to lay out a staircase. His master was a hard man with a gift for teaching, and he told his apprentices that a carpenter who could not build a staircase was no carpenter at all, because a stair had to be right in every dimension or a man would fall. Asa built his first, at seventeen, for a widow in Hadley, and it is said to be still in use. By twenty he was working for himself, taking both house-framing and cabinet work. The Connecticut valley in the first years of the nineteenth century was a region in transition. Farmers were getting rich on onions, tobacco, broom corn and the wool of merino sheep. Brick mansions with fanlights and pilasters were going up in Northampton and Hadley, and the new cotton and paper mills along the tributary streams needed frames, floors and machinery housings. A skilled carpenter could make a good living, and Asa, who was a steady, even-tempered man with a talent for the exact, soon had more commissions than he could handle. He made tall clocks' cases, chests of drawers, sideboards and cradles. He framed barns and meeting houses. He was known for a simple, well-proportioned style that owed a little to Hepplewhite and a good deal to his own sense of measure. He met Nancy Faulkner in 1805, when he built the cabinets for her new shop in Northampton. She was twenty-six, brisk and quick-witted, and she had a shop with a bow window on the main street where she made and sold bonnets, caps and ribbons. She wanted a counter with a dozen shallow drawers for her trimmings and a tall glass-fronted case for the bonnets, and she drew the plans herself on the back of a bill. Asa, who was used to customers who could not say what they wanted, found her a pleasure. He came back three times to check a measurement that did not need checking. They were married in 1807, in a quiet ceremony at the meeting house in Northampton, and he moved into the rooms above her shop. He learned about the Faulkners in his second year of marriage, when Nancy, who had thought carefully about how to put it, told him one evening that her family had a second trade. She said that her father had been a vampire slayer, that her brothers and her sister were hunters, that there was a book in which they kept a tally and that she herself had no part in the hunting, only in the keeping of the letters. Asa, who had been taking a rule to a newel post, put it down and asked if the family needed anything built. It was, she said afterwards, exactly the right question. He built a great deal. A cousin from Concord arrived with a request for a cupboard with a sliding back; a hunter from Salem wanted a locking chest of a certain size for silver; a schoolteacher in Newbury asked for a window shutter that could be barred from within. He took Jacob Cole's pattern for the hidden compartments, which Cole had perfected in the valley, and improved it with a spring catch that made no sound. He refused payment beyond the cost of the wood. The Faulkner cousins took to calling him the family's joiner, and he took to the name. Their daughter Ida Sherman Faulkner was born in 1809 and lived until 1872. Their son Lewis Faulkner Sherman was born in 1811 and lived until 1894. Neither was called to the hunt, but both grew up with their father's hands and their mother's eye, and both knew the smell of cedar shavings and the sound of a tapped joint. Asa taught Lewis to make a mortise before he was ten, and Ida to sharpen a chisel, and he told both of them that a joint which had to be hidden was never as good as a joint which did not need to be. The War of 1812 closed the coastal trade and sent the price of timber up, but the valley's building went on. The years after the war were good ones. By the 1820s he had two journeymen and a shop on the river road, and the Sherman name was stamped on the back of half the good chests in Hampshire County. The Erie Canal and, later, the railroad changed the pace of business, but the valley's demand for well-made things did not slacken. In the 1830s he built a number of the big frame houses that still line the main street of Northampton. He died in 1839, aged fifty-eight, at the end of a long, contented life, in a chair he had made. Nancy followed him within the year. Their son Lewis carried the shop on until he was past eighty. Asa Sherman is remembered in the Faulkner family as the joiner, the man who built the wall behind which the Ledger sat. In the Slayerverse he represents the craftsmen of the Red Ledger's periphery, whose fine work and silent loyalty gave a hunting family its strong rooms.