Liberty tool shop finds niche market Store draws collectors, craftsmen

LIBERTY – Pliers to planes, chisels to chain cutters, hand saws to hammers, they’re here in bins and shelves and racks brimming with them. And also a pitchfork, peavey and pipe threader or two.

Antique shoppers, wood crafters with keen eyes for special makes or styles, and plain old homemakers exercising Yankee frugality find a deal at Liberty Tool Co., located in a four-story, white clapboard building in the center of a quiet town that long ago buzzed and clanked with mills and machine shops.

Liberty represents a trip back in time that speaks of New England’s shipbuilding and industrial heritage. The main building sets a scene for the pre-Civil War era when Liberty was a boomtown, known particularly for goods used in shipbuilding and shipping.

Inside, the store has a slightly musty smell, like the inside of an old trunk in the attic that’s opened after years.

“A lot of people are boat builders and cabinetmakers and they want the old tools,” Karen Southworth, who calls herself a “tool goddess,” said from behind the cluttered counter on a sizzling summer afternoon.

Just a few weeks ago, said Southworth, a cabinetmaker from Alaska came in and spotted a plow plane. “He left, then he came back and said, ‘I’ve just got to have it,”‘ Southworth recalled with a smile.

Liberty Tool is one of three sites owned by H.G. “Skip” Brack, a former college English teacher who also has stores in the coastal towns of Searsport and Hulls Cove in Bar Harbor.

During the nearly four decades he has been searching through attics, cellars and old factories for old tools, Brack has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of early toolmaking, not to mention a fair selection of other antiques.

The 63-year-old Brack has parlayed his expertise into publications that add depth to what he says is a shallow public repository of information about antique tools and toolmaking.

“The material I’m dealing with is not readily available in traditional academic or published sources,” he said. While Brack acknowledges Liberty Tool “looks like a big, secondhand flea market,” he tries to focus attention on the historic gems and tool art he displays across the street in his Davistown Museum.

In all of his stores, Brack estimates he has got hundreds of thousands of tools in stock. Approaching the front door of Liberty Tool through the cluttered porch, a chalked notice on slate seeks to reassure customers that the inventory won’t run dry: “New load of tools every Sat.”

Partitioned wooden boxes hold metal punches, tiny files, drill bits and different kinds of saw blades. Larger bins bulge with tin snips, channel locks, chisels, pipe cutters and drill bits. A soda box holds screwdrivers of various styles and sizes.

Bins also hold all sizes of crescent wrenches and grinding wheels, as well as metal punches, tiny files, drill bits, and blades for hand and power saws.

Tables and shelves have ample displays of power drills, routers, jig saws and sanders like your dad – and maybe his dad – used to have.

A rack holds scads of hammers and an even larger rack holds time-tested sledges, mauls and crow bars. There are squares and wooden levels, and some of the windows are shaded by the ample supply of antique buck saws.

Large bins are stuffed with handsaws, mostly wooden-handled. There are drawers of wooden handles, scissors and sockets. Coffee and peanut butter jars hold assortments of screws, washers, Allen wrenches, spacers, bolts, anchors, clasps and hook-and-eyes.

Here and there, though, an antique picture, book or stuffed owl pops into sight. “I would never pass up a good set of doorknobs, or a cast iron frying pan,” noted Brack.

The place closes in mid-January, and when it reopens in early March, people are standing in line to get in, Southworth said.

Once Liberty Tool is open for the season, “We have people waiting at 8 in the morning and I have to kick them out at closing time,” she said.

Crawford Stanley, a craftsman who has an eye for antique tool reproductions, said Liberty draws everyday tool users who have an eye for bargains. They can save 60 to 80 percent of the cost of a new tool by buying an older one of the same quality, said Stanley.

And for woodworkers, the selection of hand planes can hardly be matched, he said.

Woodcrafters, especially boat builders like the man from Alaska, insist on using the traditional hand tools to give their products a genuine quality, said Brack, who had just bought out a wooden-boat building shop in Portsmouth, N.H.

“There’s still a huge interest in Maine in wooden boats,” Brack said.

Time-traveling shoppers are catapulted back into the 1950s as they venture across the street to a two-bay Mobil gas station, complete with old pumps. But inside, it’s all tools, including antiques and a number of table saws, miter saws and other larger power tools.

While there are deals to be had, Brack’s most treasured tools are not for sale. Some of them are kept at the Davistown Museum.

The oldest tool in the museum is a folding rule, used to measure volumes of beer and other liquids, that’s signed by its maker, Robert Merchant, in 1720. Brack said he knows of no older signed tool in the country.

Friends (from left) Jean Wakem, Kris Kuebler, Cyle Petrig and Vicky Johnson review treasures found at Liberty Tool Co. while sitting on a front porch waiting out a thunderstorm in Liberty recently. Kuebler and Petrig were visiting from Marin, Calif., and stopped in for a visit.