Millers Falls No. 107 Carving Tool Set, Five Tools with Oilstone in Original Labeled Box, Greenfield Mass., c. 1935–1955

The Piece

A complete boxed carving set, and a lovely object even before you consider what it does. Five palm-handled carving tools lie in a fitted rack inside a dovetailed pine box, each handle turned in blonde beech — a broad rounded palm swelling forward to a hexagonal collar, shaped so the tool sits in the heel of the hand and drives from the shoulder rather than the wrist. Every handle is stamped MILLERS-FALLS in blue across the face.

The blades are hammer-forged tool steel in five different profiles — straight chisel, skew, and gouges in varying sweeps — fitted with polished nickel ferrules and set into the handles dead straight. A rectangular oilstone lies alongside in its own compartment for maintaining the edge, exactly as the label instructs.

The box is the other half of the piece: pine, joined at all four corners with fine machine-cut finger dovetails, with a sliding lid that runs in a rabbet. Both original paper labels survive — the full blue instruction label on the lid and the orange end label reading ONE CARVING TOOL SET — No. 107 — Made in U.S.A. by Millers Falls Company, Greenfield, Mass., U.S.A.

History & Provenance

The Millers Falls Company was one of the great names in American hand tools. Founded in Massachusetts in 1868 and later headquartered at Greenfield, the firm built its reputation on braces, bit stocks, hand drills, and eggbeater drills so well made that they remain the collector's benchmark to this day. When Millers Falls put its name on something, it meant the same thing Stanley's did.

The No. 107 was the company's compact carving set — five tools chosen, as the lid label says, "to give the greatest possible range of cuts and effects and in an inexpensive combination for carving woods and linoleum blocks." That second phrase dates it culturally as much as the label style does: linoleum block printing swept American art rooms and home studios from the 1920s through the 1950s, and Millers Falls was selling this set as much to the linocut printmaker and the school art department as to the woodcarver.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Old American carving tools outperform most of what's sold new. The steel Millers Falls used takes and holds an edge that modern budget sets cannot approach, and these five will go straight back to work after twenty minutes on a stone — for relief carving, chip carving, spoon work, or the linocut printing they were originally sold for. The palm handles are the reason to want them specifically: they're shaped for controlled detail work at close quarters, which is the hardest thing to do with a long-handled chisel.

For anyone who isn't carving, the box does the work. A complete labeled tool set in its original case is one of the best-looking things you can put on a shelf — the blonde handles ranked in their rack, the aged blue and orange paper, the dovetailed pine. It sits perfectly in a study, a workshop, a library, or a shop display, and it is exactly the kind of object people pick up and open.