Bill Gould grew up in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, started working in the woods as a teenager, and has been a logger, sawyer, basket maker, and now birchbark canoe maker. Since 1980, he and his wife, Sherry Gould, have lived in Warner, where they manage 220 acres, including a woodlot. They also raise sheep for wool, which they spin into yarn (and have a few goats and one llama as well). Bill and Sherry are members of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation and make traditional Abenaki baskets, and both are members of the Vermont Abenaki Artists Association. They are also involved in the Abenaki Trails Project, started in 2020 to share the history and collaboration of Abenaki people in New Hampshire.
I started cutting and selling firewood as a teenager, went to work in a sawmill and then started in the woods full-time when I was about 19. I like being outside. I didn’t like normal type 9-to-5 jobs. I’m very independent. Originally, I went to work for a sawmill in Henniker – Henniker Hardwood Pallets – in the ’70s. I was working in the garage there and filling in doing different things. At one point, the guy that ran the woods operation came in and he needed somebody to cut logs up on a landing on a lot they were doing. I went and did that, and I really liked it. Then one of the guys that ran one of the skidders quit, so he offered me that job, and I took it and I liked it. So I stuck with it. A year or two later, I bought my first skidder. I think I was 20. Then a couple of years later, I set up an old Lane handset sawmill.
I like the freedom to be able to work when you want to work. It’s not the easiest life sometimes. You’ve got to love it. It was a situation where I could park my machine if I needed to, and if somebody needed somebody to work on a lot or something, I would go do that. I had friends who were in the logging business, and if they needed someone to run a piece of equipment on a woodlot, I’d go do that. Then I’d go back at it again on my own. I would do woodlots. I would buy my own stumpage. I had foresters I worked with who would get a hold of me if they had a job. There was plenty to keep busy. I didn’t have a lot of people I was trying to keep employed or anything like that. Back then, you could go downtown and find two people if you needed someone to chop. They might last six months, they might last a year, they might last a week, but they knew what they were doing. I think it would be hard to find that now.
Back when I started, everything was manual. You cut a tree with a chainsaw. You had a cable skidder. Now, everything is mostly mechanical. There are some small crews, but less and less. And less and less sawmills and markets. When I started, there were seven sawmills in Henniker, and they were all busy. When I was sawing lumber in the ’90s, I sawed all hardwood, but I had flooring people that I sold to, a guy that made lobster traps that I sold to, wooden crutches, wooden wheelbarrows, Peterboro Baskets, an old guy in the middle of Nashua who made wooden handles for Fuller Brush Company. It was just a lot of small mom and pop outfits that did different things. There was a market for everything somewhere. Then everything started going plastic. All the handles are plastic, the crutches aren’t wood anymore, the lobster traps are plastic. So all those little markets have gone away, and the littler mills have pretty much gone away. Now it’s more big companies. It’s all getting more corporate.
And the timber isn’t here like it used to be. With mechanical harvesting, woodlots get cut a lot harder than when it was just you with a chainsaw. Years ago, I was doing a lot of logging for Lorden Lumber, and they owned like 7,000 acres. You would go in and all you’d cut was trees 14 inches breast height and up. You didn’t cut anything smaller than that. That’s how everything was sustained. Now they cut everything they can reach with the machine. It’s so easy to grab it and stuff it in a chipper. Back then there was no chip market, there was no pulpwood. You might sell a little firewood, but if it wasn’t a saw log, there was no home for it, so there was no point in cutting a tree you weren’t going to get logs out of.
Now the woodlots are getting smaller, the land is getting broken up. Back when I started, there were a lot of small farmers, and they would pretty much do their own TSI [Timber Stand Improvement] work and would cut their 20-30 cords of wood every year and would cut the junk wood for firewood. And they had good timber left, and every now and then, they’d need money for taxes or a new tractor, and you’d go in and cut 20 acres for them. But those have all gone away. Now there’s houses where the farm used to be, and a lot of the woodlots have turned into conservation land to keep them from being developed. And a lot of these conservation agencies don’t believe in cutting timber. Some do, but some don’t.
In the latter part of the ’90s, I got away from the logging for a year or two and started sawing lumber. I got tied in with Peterboro Basket Company. I would saw ash for them. That sort of perked my interest in basket making. My wife’s family were basket makers in Vermont. One of her relatives was one of the first basket weavers at Peterboro Basket when they opened. So my wife, Sherry, had an interest. She did a basket apprenticeship with Jeanne Brink up in Vermont. She was making the fancy baskets, the more delicate decorative baskets. They have sweetgrass in them and different curls and stuff.
Sherry wanted to learn how to make utility baskets. She ended up getting a grant to work with Newt Washburn in Bethlehem. Newt was a famous basket maker, and he was 92 years old then. He was too old to pound any ash to make baskets with, so I went up and started doing that for him. You have to make different tools to cut the ash with and tools to split the splint with, and different molds for different baskets. It got to a point where I was doing everything but making the baskets. So I started making the baskets. I cut and use brown ash and make utility baskets – pack baskets, fishing creels, and gathering baskets.
I learned from Newt. Part of his family was Abenaki, and part was German, but both sides were basket makers. On his round baskets, he did this star-type thing on the bottom of the baskets and it’s indented, and I think that was from the German side of the family. When Newt grew up making baskets, that’s how they traded at the store. They would make baskets in the winter and trade for the groceries or whatever they needed. And farmers all used baskets. Then galvanized pails came out, and baskets went out of style. He had an autobody shop, but he had to give that up for health reasons in his 50s, so he started making baskets again and continued until he died in his 90s.
When you’re pounding ash – you take a brown ash log. You want it to be fairly straight. Eight-foot long is a good length. You look for the growth rings to be fairly evenly spaced apart, not too fine. You take the bark off, and you pound along the length of the ash with a hammer or a mallet or an axe or whatever your weapon of choice is. That separates each year’s growth rings. It crushes the cambium between each growth ring. Then you pull the strips up. At Peterboro Basket, everything they do is sawn. Their ash baskets are all sawn baskets. Longaberger baskets are all sawn wood, not pounded wood. The benefit of the pounded wood is that you’re doing everything with the grain. It’s much more flexible. Sawn wood is kind of hit or miss, if the grain is bad or you run off the grain when you’re sawing it. The original Abenaki basket makers didn’t have that option.
Once you take the strips off the tree, you can use them immediately to make your baskets, or you can roll them up. Once you roll them up, you can keep them forever. They’ll dry out, but that doesn’t matter – anytime you want to use them, you just soak them. You cut your strips to whatever width you’re going to make your basket – weavers and uprights. When you split the splint, you get a real shiny, silky side, and that’s what they use in the fancy baskets. Any roughness you scrape down with a knife like you would plane a board.
To pound enough splint off that log to make a pack basket takes probably two or three hours, four hours, maybe, depending how good it goes. As far as weaving the basket – I don’t know. You probably can weave one up in one day, maybe two. I’ve never tracked it, and I get asked that all the time. I just don’t stick with them from start to finish. I might weave the bottom of a basket up and let it sit and not go back to it for a week. I might have two or three going at the same time.
The future for brown ash does not look good with the emerald ash borer. I don’t think we’re going to have any left. I have enough ash stored away to last me my lifetime. That doesn’t do other people any good. That’s one reason I started doing birchbark canoes. My wife’s been talking a lot lately about her basket making work. She’s been talking about doing more birchbark baskets.
I met a young guy, Reid Schwartz, while canoeing during an Abenaki Trails Project activity. We discovered that we both were very interested in building birchbark canoes and decided to build one. We finished the first one and Reid tried it out on my beaver pond. It is now on display as part of an Abenaki Art exhibit at the Mount Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner. Next it will be part of a display at the Hopkinton Historical Society. We have now started a second canoe.
I’ve researched birchbark canoes for 20 years and read every book I could get my hands on. And Reid had done the same thing. We had the basic knowledge of where to start. But I have to do something to really learn how to do it. I can read a book and watch a video, and it will tell you the steps to do, but I’m the type of person who needs to know the reason you’re doing the steps. Once I do it, it makes sense. There’s a lot of bending and splitting of wood, and I’ve done that all my life, so I’m familiar with that. The only thing I wasn’t familiar with was the bark and how that would act and the properties. Now I’ve learned a lot about that, by doing it.
The first thing is, you’ve got to get some bark that’s suitable. There are birch trees that if you fold the bark, it’s really booky – there’s a lot of layers, and they separate like a book. That’s not what you want. You need to find a piece of bark that’s the right flexibility and the right thickness. One 16th of an inch is perfectly fine. And you need a tree that doesn’t have a lot of knots and cat faces and cracks. It’s got to be a fairly decent looking piece of bark. A 12-inch tree will do it, which will give you a 3-foot-wide piece, which is big enough to lay out and fold up on each side.
With a birchbark canoe, you’re starting from the outside and working your way in, where with a regular boat you start with the inside and work your way out. In a birchbark canoe, the ribs go in last, you start with your covering and work your way in. The ribs are mostly white cedar. You can use brown ash or spruce. We have very little cedar where we are, but there’s a guy who owns a cedar swamp a few miles from me, and he was gracious enough to let us cut a cedar tree. I also have some nice spruce left over from when I had my mill going. You can use spruce for the gunnels and the ribs – it’s a little heavier than cedar is. You use spruce root to sew the pieces together.
I am a member of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, which is headquartered in Barton, Vermont, but we have tribal members all over. Years ago, the Connecticut River was not a boundary; it was a highway. We didn’t have little squares and boxes for towns like we do now. The Abenaki Trails Project is a group of us who live here locally and wanted to do something here. It was the idea of tribal member Darryl Peasley, who lives in Hopkinton. We started the Abenaki Trails Project in August, basically to highlight Abenaki presence and activity in New Hampshire, both historically and presently, and to highlight Abenaki-colonial collaboration, then and now.
There’s a lot of misinformation in New Hampshire that Abenaki peoples never lived here, but just passed through from one place to another. Not only did they live here, but their descendants still live here. We started working with Hopkinton and Henniker and Bradford and Warner. There were some village sites. There’s a lot of archeological evidence. Obviously, Abenaki people have lived here for thousands of years. When you do hear about Abenaki people, all you hear about is the massacres and the battles. But there was also a lot of collaboration that you don’t hear about. Back then, if you went 20 miles from the Sea Coast, you were in the wilderness. Not only did the Abenaki that lived here have to survive, so did the settlers. They had to work together so they could both survive. It just seems like the time has come that people are interested in this.