In 2015 I started a blog about the old tools located in the Tison Tool Barn, part of the Matheson History Museum in Gainesville, Florida. I had been volunteering at the museum for a few years, and had been asked to place a catalog of the tools in the Barn on-line. While there were photographs of the original collection taken more than 15 years earlier, they were mounted in an album, with numbered dot stickers keying them to an index. I soon found that removing the photos from the album for scanning usually resulted in the loss of the numbered dots, and that scans of the photos were often of poor quality. I therefore started photographing the individual tools, intending to include all of the approximately 1,000 items that had accumulated in the Tool Barn in 18 years. I researched the tools and put the photos in a blog, trying to provide enough information to explain when and how the tools originated and how they were used. Unfortunately, after about six months of work, I no longer felt comfortable at the museum, and quit working on the project. Somewhat to my amazement, the number of visitors to the blog has grown since then, with a few thousand views and a few hundred unique viewers each week as of May, 2017.
I have a number of photos of tools and other items in the Tison Tool Barn that I had not researched and for which I had not prepared a blog post, including:
