Home
Articles & Essays
Writers Wanted
About Us
Contact Us
Articles & Essays
Home | View all Essays
A southwest Nebraska craftsman makes a living as a traditional “cooper.”
by David L. Bristow
Thomas Jefferson imagined the future America as a continent full of independent farmers and artisans, but today such people are the exception. In some ways, Jim Gaster of Indianola is a throwback to Jefferson’s day, leading a rural life while practicing the traditional craft of coopering. In other ways, he and his wife, Marilyn, are tech-savvy Internet entrepreneurs connecting to a global market.
Eleven miles east of McCook, Jim and Marilyn Gaster’s log home sits high on the bluffs overlooking the Republican River valley and the town of Indianola, population 642. The property was, they said, “nothing but prairie grass” when they bought it in 1977 and began planting more than 800 trees a year.
The winding country road that leads to the Gaster place ascends a steep hill to a narrow drive, which crosses a field of cedars and yucca to a row of outbuildings near the house. Crowing roosters greeted me, along with a small dog who pretended, unconvincingly, that he had not been petted lately.
Stacked neatly by the front porch were French-style water barrels, several rope-handled buckets, a little keg to hold lead shot, and a gunpowder barrel bound with wooden hoops instead of iron — the better to avoid a spark that could blow your fort’s powder magazine to kingdom come.
I didn’t know all that just by looking, of course. All I could see was that everything was well-made and looked simultaneously new and old. There wasn’t an item in the stack that hasn’t been obsolete for more than a century, but Gaster, who soon appeared from his shop, explained everything.
Hobby to career
A carpenter by trade, Gaster found his new line of work by way of a hobby. He has long been a “buckskinner,” an amateur historical re-enactor who portrays life in the fur trade era. In their encampments, buckskinners wear period clothing and use period tools. But Gaster noticed a lack of historically accurate buckets.
“A person trying to pretend they’re in the 1790s and carrying a galvanized pail or plastic bucket just didn’t cut it,” he said. After attending an hour-long seminar on the basics of making a wooden bucket, Gaster went back to his shop, only to discover “I couldn’t do it. There was a lot more to it than just slapping some boards together,” he said.
Undaunted, he sought more information, but found none. In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise him. “A hundred years from now, how much information are you going to find about Styrofoam cups?” he said. “Everybody’s got them, but you don’t think about it. The other thing is, the guilds kept things secret. You gave an oath that you’d never let your trade secrets out.”
In the early 1990s, Gaster began the long process of teaching himself to be a cooper, a maker of wooden buckets and barrels. He found some information on the making of barrels, but mostly he visited museums, looking at his predecessors’ tools and handiwork. Then, “I just kinda went to the shop and started experimenting,” he said, “and worked at it till I had a product worth being sold.”
Finding a market
Gaster wanted to make hand-crafted, historically-accurate items, but he also wanted to make a living at it. A small bucket requires a half-day’s work; large barrels require several days each. He knew he wasn’t going to find anyone willing to pay $90 for a gallon bucket at a craft show. He needed to find the historical re-enactors and living history museums that would be willing to pay for historical accuracy and attention to detail.
It was decade-long, self-taught apprenticeship. Gaster sold his first buckets in 1998, but continued to do carpentry on the side. Ironically, the Internet made Gaster’s old-fashioned trade possible. Though he and Marilyn had had some success attending conferences of farm and living history museums, it was their website, www.beaverbuckets.com, that connected them with an international market. In 2000, Marilyn and son Jeremy attended an Internet business seminar at McCook Community College. A month later, after improving their website, they received an email from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
“That was our first break,” Marilyn said. “They wanted a replica of a washtub. I said, ‘Jim, can you do this? He wasn’t so sure he could do it, either!”
But he did, and the Smithsonian placed more custom orders. Other museums followed. Soon, the Gasters were dealing with museums in the United States, Britain and Japan. By 2002, Jim was able to abandon carpentry in favor of full-time coopering. In addition to buckets and barrels, he also makes basins, butter churns, yokes (for carrying water buckets), 19th century military canteens, even a kit for making your own bucket. He has provided props for several motion pictures and television shows, including “The Alamo,” “Seabiscuit,” and PBS’s “Colonial House.” Buckets for “Master and Commander” were made of balsa wood so they would shatter easily during battle scenes. Jim and Marilyn joked about watching the movie with more of an eye on the buckets than on the plot.
Making authentic replicas
In his custom work, Gaster often makes replicas of decayed originals. The items stacked in front of the house were based on artifacts recovered from a 17th century shipwreck off Corpus Christi, Texas. Each of the big water barrels required a week’s labor and a hundred dollar’s worth of quarter-sawn white oak (from Table Rock, Neb.). Gaster said he’d never built barrels quite like them before. That happens a lot, he said.
“People will call and ask for something completely off the wall,” he said. One customer asked for viviander keg, something he had never heard of. “It’s a little oval keg that looks like it’s been squished flat.” In Napoleon’s day, the kegs were used by women to take wine to troops on the battlefield. “It’s awful to make,” Gaster said, though he clearly enjoys the challenge.
To make his buckets and barrels, Gaster uses some power tools, at least in the early stages when he is cutting the wood down to size. The fine work is done by hand, so that no two items look alike. An old carpenter taught him how to “cook up” black walnut hulls to make an old-fashioned, non-toxic stain. To achieve an aged look, Gaster also rusts the metal bands so they aren’t shiny. Some barrels, such as replicas of gunpowder barrels, are held together with willow shoots instead of iron hoops. From time to time, Gaster visits river bottoms in eastern Nebraska to gather shoots.
“The beavers, they’re my silent partners,” he said. “They go and nibble down these trees, and after that the shoots grow up nice and straight and I can make wooden hoops from them. I let the beavers have the crooked ones. They don’t care,” he chuckled. He named the business “Beaver Buckets” in honor of his sharp-toothed associates.
For Marilyn, the best part about the business is how it allows the family to work together. “When he was a carpenter, none of the rest of us were involved in it,” she said. She does the bookkeeping, talks with customers, and keeps “going to McCook Community College all the time to learn more about business.” The Gasters’ two grown sons, though they have careers of their own, have also been involved. Jeremy, now 24, designed the website, and Bryan, 28, helped Jim write a book, How to Make a Coopered Wooden Bucket, which the family believes is the only book in existence on the subject.
For Jim, who describes himself as a “farm boy who’s left the farm,” it’s a satisfying life. He and Marilyn see their success as a blessing from God. Their website includes a quote from the Book of Proverbs: “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings; he will not serve before obscure men.”
Kings and coopers are about equally scarce these days, but with movie sets and prestigious museums for customers, it seems that for the Gasters the proverb has come true.
To learn more about how you can be a writer for Nebraska Rural Living, and have your essays posted on this site, visit our 'Writers Wanted' page.
back to top