Jacob Cole

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Jacob Cole was a carpenter who was born in 1776 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and who spent sixty-six years building the wooden things that New England lived in, sailed on and was buried in. He never married, had no children and held no place in the Red Ledger's tally. Yet among the Faulkner family's quiet helpers he has a fair claim to be the best-remembered, because he built the false wall, the sliding panel and the lockable loft in which the Ledger itself was kept for a generation, and he never told anyone in his trade what they were for. He died in 1842 of a fever, at the age of sixty-six. The Coles were a storekeeping family with roots on the North Shore and in the river valley. His father, Ephraim Faulkner Cole, was born in 1749 and died in 1796. The middle name marks the family's descent from the Faulkner house by the female line, and though Ephraim was no hunter, he understood that the cousins who sometimes arrived at night with mud on their boots were owed a bed and no questions. His mother, Keziah Woodbury, born in 1743 and dead in 1798, was a farmer's wife and the keeper of the household accounts, a woman who could reckon the price of a barrel of molasses faster than the clerks at the Salem customs house. Jacob had one brother, Daniel Faulkner Cole, who was two years older and who was called to the hunter's work late in life. Jacob was born in Marblehead because that was where the family happened to be when his mother's time came. Ephraim's storekeeping business had brought the household to the harbour town for a couple of years, to supply the fishing fleet and to settle a debt, and the boy had his first sight of the sea from a window above a chandlery. The family moved back to the Connecticut valley before he could remember it. What he kept of Marblehead was a love of ships, a particular smell of tar and salt cod, and a conviction that the best work any man could do with his hands was to shape wood so that it kept water out. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a master housewright in one of the mill towns on the Connecticut River. The trade in those years covered everything made of timber: houses, barns, meeting houses, mills, wagons, coffins, and the great wooden wheels of the new water-powered factories that were beginning to line the rivers. An apprentice learned first to sharpen tools, which took a year, then to plane, to saw, to chisel a mortise and to cut a tenon, and finally to read a drawing and frame a building. Jacob learned it all, slowly and well. He was a short, broad man with thick forearms and a habit of humming hymn tunes under his breath as he worked, and he had the carpenter's exact eye, able to see a sixteenth of an inch in a board from across a room. By the time he was twenty-one, he had set up on his own. The decades after the Revolution were the great age of wooden building in New England, and there was work for any man who could frame a house. He raised farmhouses with big central chimneys, barns with a hay loft and a threshing floor, meeting houses with a pulpit and a gallery, and, in the new factory villages, rows of workers' cottages and the mill buildings themselves. His signature was a particular kind of joint, a wedged through tenon with a chamfered edge, that he used in every frame he built. Fifty years later, a surveyor of historic buildings could walk into a barn in the valley and say from the joinery that it was Cole's. He also became, without ever exactly agreeing to it, the Faulkner family's carpenter. His brother Daniel asked him, in about 1808, to build a hiding place for the family's records in the Cole farmhouse, and Jacob did it: a false back in a built-in cupboard, with a sliding panel that opened only if you pressed a particular knot in the pine. Daniel said he needed it for papers. Jacob, who was no fool, looked at the papers and the silver-mounted pistol that came with them, asked no questions, and built a better hiding place than he had been asked for. Word spread in the cousinhood, and over the next thirty years he built similar devices for a dozen Faulkner households: a hinged stair tread, a loft with a removable ladder, a cellar door that looked like a wall. He charged his ordinary price and never discussed the work. One cousin remarked that a Cole cupboard was the only lock in New England that did not look like a lock. His brother's death in 1817 fell hard on him. Daniel was a slayer of the Red Ledger who died in a fall from a roof during a chase, and it was Jacob who was sent for when the body was found, who built the coffin and who stood at the grave. He was forty-one at the time and had never been a hunter or wanted to be. He said at the funeral that one of the brothers needed to stay home and mend things, and he spent the rest of his life proving it. He looked after the Cole land, which Daniel had worked, and sold it only in his sixties. He kept his brother's books, a few of which survive, in a neat hand that may be the best record of the family's Connecticut valley branch. He never married. The reasons the family gave were various: that he was too shy, that he was too busy, that he had loved a girl in his youth who had died of a fever, that he had no need of a wife. In his own opinion, expressed rarely, he had a house, a workshop, a cat, a brother's grave to tend and a great many buildings to look after, which was sufficient. His nephews and nieces in the wider family, who knew him as a visiting uncle, remembered him for the little wooden toys he carved and gave away: a boat with a real keel, a wagon with turning wheels, a cradle the size of a shoebox. Jacob Cole died in 1842, aged sixty-six, of a fever that went through the valley that autumn and killed a great many people. He was laid out in a coffin of his own making, a plain pine box with pegged joints that he had built for himself years before and stored in the loft. The parish register says simply that he was a carpenter and an honest man. Jacob Cole is remembered in the Faulkner family as the builder of the hiding places, the man whose craft kept the Red Ledger safe through half a century. Several of his devices are still in place in old houses in the Connecticut valley. In the Slayerverse he is honoured as one of the many tradespeople whose skill and discretion sustained the long rivalry of the Red and White Ledgers.