When Jane Butler was a young girl, her father loved to tinker with radios and electronics. Together, using a soldering iron, they’d fix items.
“My dad taught me to use tools when I was little and I’ve always been interested in tools, making things and using things,” Butler said.
Who knew she’d make a full-time job out of it? Butler sells antique hand tools from a small workshop connected to her Bennington home. She shares the space with her husband, Mike Butler, a master carpenter.
On Thursday, Butler is hard at work answering emails and getting ready to ship some of the items she purchased from a huge auction in New York.
Every weekend Butler attends an estate sale or a yard sale or an auction. On Sunday, she starts sorting and cleaning whatever tools she bought. On Tuesday, she brings the tools down into her basement where she has a mini photography studio, where she snaps images for her website. On Thursday morning, she sends out her newsletter to the 3,800 people on her email list, who eagerly check to see what Butler managed to procure that week.
The list is made up of furniture makers, carpenters, luthiers, coopers, historical re-enactors and collectors. People who love to stop by Butler’s workshop for a chat about 19th century English handsaws or wood planes from Stanley.
“It’s fun, it’s a great bunch of people,” Butler said.
Butler, who owned her own advertising agency and worked in the industry for 30 years, moved to the Monadnock region in 2006 from Washington, D.C. To get acquainted with the area, Butler and her husband traveled around touring yard sales for fun. That’s when she noticed the tools.
“We found all these tools and we thought, oh this is interesting, because you never saw them in Virginia,” she said. “We started buying them and then I discovered there was this whole subculture of people that were using them.”
She reads reference guides voraciously, researching each tool she finds at a yard sale.
“I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’ve got a lot of reference books and I read them a lot and I talk to people, so I know what almost everything is,” Butler said.
Toolmakers, like Stanley Rule and Level Co., popped up across New England in the early 19th century. The dozens of factories created tens of thousands of tools, ones that have stayed in reasonably decent condition thanks to the climate in the Northeast.
A lot of her customers which span the country — and the globe. She’s sent tools to Florida, Australia and England.
Butler’s father died about 10 years ago, before she picked up the hobby that became a labor of love.
“He would have really enjoyed it -— a lot,” Butler said. “And it would have been fun to share it with him.”
Tony Marquis can be reached at 924-7172, ext. 225 or tmarquis@ledgertranscript.com.