TALCOTT W.VA. (Hinton News) – I just acquired this toolbox to add to my collection on Thursday, Sept. 3. My mother and I purchased it from my Great Uncle Orice “Buck” Thompson’s online estate auction in Union, West Virginia which was conducted by Entrusted Auctions.
Entrusted Auctions does an exceptional job of caring for the items as if they were their own and preserving the history related to each individual piece. Owner Jarred Hines and I have become friends, connecting with our passion for local history pieces. Being “kindred spirits” we both have learned the importance of our antique business traits in preserving our history.
I divert back to the toolbox you see here. It was built and used by my great-great-grandfather L.W. Thompson. I have written about him on several occasions. He was a very prolific businessman in Summers County, the Thompson side of my family was in general.
Aside from owning and operating a very successful orchard in Summers County in the 1910s. He built many homes and businesses in Summers County up until the 1940s. In his “spare time,” he operated a hardware store in Talcott which on the side had a Kurfees Paint shop in it. The photo of the sign you see here is the original porcelain sign off of his store in Talcott.
Somehow he still managed to build fantastic oak furniture during his tenure as a carpenter. It was mostly in the Arts and Crafts style with “butterfly hinges” being his “calling card”, just about every piece of his furniture I have ever seen has these features. He always signed his pieces: “L.W. Thompson Talcott, W.Va” on the back of the piece or the bottom of one of the drawers.
Now as for his toolbox, this was his finishing carpentry toolbox, holding his best tools. The inside has various trays and compartments for planes, files and rasps, etc. There are numerous holes to hang his chisels and assorted hand tools.
The Thompsons never had anything good to say about President Roosevelt or any of the programs he implemented during the Great Depression which was from 1929 to 1941. My grandfather, Bernard, and his brother, my Great Uncle Leonard would go to job sites to help their grandfather during this time.
L.W. had this toolbox on site once finishing up a job. Granddad told me this story several times. L.W. would pay them a small amount for helping him. Uncle Leonard thought he would be “cute” after he was “paid” for helping L.W. and found a can of white paint.
Across the top of this toolbox, he painted “W.P.A.” He did this because like I said the family never thought much of these programs and he wrote this after he was paid as a way of saying “hard work for little pay”. Haha
Granddad never told me what L.W. did other than he got very mad. And made Uncle Leonard scrub, strip the paint off of the toolbox and restain it. Needless to say, Uncle Leonard was never asked again to help him on another job. Ha
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