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“I got hammered in Haines, Alaska” read the T-shirts from the Hammer Museum, a small house ninety miles north of Juneau which displays over fifteen hundred hammers. Cigar box hammers, medical hammers, paving hammers, around-the-corner hammers. Hammers that look like axes. Hammers for testing the quality of cheese. Founder Dave Pahl left Cleveland for Alaska just out of high school in ’73 with a pioneer drive and longing for a back-to-the-land lifestyle. He’d spent time tinkering in his grandfather’s basement shop — “The man could make or fix anything,” Pahl said to me over the phone from Haines. “He was a true jack-of-all-trades” — but otherwise he had little building experience.
Pahl and his wife built a cabin together, and lived without electricity for twenty years, “until I built my own hydroelectric plant,” he explained. A life without plugs meant a life without power tools, and Pahl learned blacksmithing and forged over a hundred different hammers for himself. A trip with his two sons to the lower forty-eight introduced him to antique shops and flea markets. “I bought a hammer I knew I would never use — a medical hammer, the kind they bang on your knee — and that’s when the collecting started.”
He opened the museum in 2002. Cruise ships float into Haines during the summer months, and Pahl works as a longshoreman. He drives thirty miles from his home, ties up the boat, and waits around town to cast off at the end of the day. When a house went up for sale on Main Street, it seemed the perfect place to pass the time and show off his collection.
What is it about the hammer? “They’re so simple and so diverse. For being a piece of iron stuck on the end of a stick, they’re so varied.” The oldest hammer in the collection: an Egyptian dolerite ball dating back to 2500 BC, likely used in the construction of the pyramids at Giza. The most modern is on loan from NASA, an outer space hammer used up at the International Space Station.
“The stories needed to be told,” Pahl said. “Just to make shoes required a huge variety of types of hammers. Nowadays people can’t relate to that.” When he’s asked about not being able to relate to using a hammer to fix your shoes, about a lack of a hands-on awareness, Pahl falters a bit. “There are benefits to this way of life,” he says of raising his sons without electricity. “The world is changing.” He pauses, starts a sentence, starts another. “I don’t know if I’d advocate others to do the same.” Another pause. And he goes back to museum-tour mode. “If you want to talk about carpentry, probably the most important hammer is the claw hammer.”
