 Young Jaxon Macaskilo, a student at EEB Chandler Junior High in Amherst, found an interesting object while digging in the area around his family cottage at Indian Point Road in Strait Shores.
Evelyne Godfrey is a professional archeologist and has been a university lecturer for the past 30 years. She’s been teaching archeological science and cultural heritage and is a specialist in ancient iron working. I met with them both to see what the history of Jaxon’s find might be.
Jaxon described how he came upon the tool. “I found it on our front lawn and there’s a little forest area by our cottage and it was around in there. I was playing outside, running around, digging up poles and I dug underneath a tree to see how much I could dig underneath it. And then I saw a little bit of wood. And so I kept on digging, and then eventually about six or 10 inches in the ground, I found the axe. And the weirdest part about it is, uh, it was a dead tree. It was only the stump.”
Evelyne suggested that before that tree was planted the axe was likely lost in that place and the tree simply grew right on top of the tool.
She went on to identify it as a combination tool which was, and still is, popular in the United States (as with the modern Leatherman) something the American’s would call a survival tool. She went on to tell us that there’s nothing like this in the British or European tradition of iron working, but it is something that’s really popular in the United States.
This particular tool combines hammer, hatchet, crowbar and a nail remover with an added hole in the middle of the tool to add leverage. Evelyne went on to shed light on the likely manufacturing origin and age of the tool.
“I can see it’s hand forged. I would say this is a fairly early version of this. Most of them date from, you know, the 1950s. They come from China, they had different traditions for forging, basically the same tools. And they were very popular, being bought in the US 1950s and sixties. This looks like a particularly early one, but I think that I can see a maker’s mark on it. That would’ve been right there. That’s where they put the maker’s mark on these Chinese ones. And there was a particular brand that they were making, these sorts of survival multi tools, and I think it was called Swordfish. And they forged it with a little image of a swordfish on it.”
“You know, it could date from any time from the 1930s to the 1960s, but I think that’s probably an early one because they’ve used quite a lot of iron to make this. You didn’t need to use that much iron to make the handle. Once you start mass manufacturing things, you get concerned about how much iron you’re using and you want to reduce it as much as possible.”
