A Visit to a Briar Sawmill: Sassetta, the 1980s

A visit to a briar sawmill is a travel piece by American pipe importer and writer R.D. Field, published in the winter 1987 issue of Pipe Smoker magazine. The text puts on record one of the least-known links in the briar trade: the cutting mill (Italian: segheria) that stands between the digger in the forest and the maker at the bench. Since pipe literature devotes most of its attention to makers and brands, notes from someone who saw firsthand this waystation where raw material becomes a block are today valued primarily as a period document. It should also be added that Field wasn't an impartial observer; in those same years he was the United States importer of Ashton pipes.

A Rule Changes

The event the text hinges on is a regulatory change. According to reports, Italy lifted its restriction on exporting raw briar abroad in the autumn of 1984; before that date, the wood could only leave the country in a processed form — as turned blanks. This information hasn't been confirmed by an independent regulatory record, but its consequences can be traced through the narrative: the change gave English and American workshops, which for years had had to buy Italian briar through middlemen, the chance to purchase directly. Ashton going straight to the source, having struggled to find blocks large enough for its big bowls, is one of the earliest examples of this; that the brand's founder, William Ashton-Taylor, went on to select his wood in person twice a year in subsequent years shows the relationship became a lasting one.

Sassetta and the Cresci Workshop

The place visited is Segherie Maremmane in Sassetta, in the province of Livorno. The business belongs to the Cresci family, and according to its own records the tradition of working raw briar bozzas dates back to 1883; at the time of the visit, Fanis Cresci was running the workshop. The narrative states that the workshop held a major share of the country's briar supply; since that share can't be independently confirmed, the figure isn't repeated here.

Wood doesn't reach the workshop from a single region. Liguria, Tuscany, Calabria, Sardinia, and Corsica are cited as the main sources. While briar burls from the northern Mediterranean coast are considered comparable to one another, wood coming from the North African coast is noted to diverge markedly in growth pattern. Makers developing regional preferences continues today; some Italian workshops, such as Castello, work with wood tied to specific regions.

From Burl to Block

The notes' most concrete contribution is their ordering of the operations that run between yard and saw room. Burls dug from the ground are kept continuously wet in enclosed storage, cut to size with large circular saws, and then boiled to be stripped of tannin and resin; field records on Tuscan practice put the boiling time at roughly twenty-four hours in copper vats. This whole set of stages is gathered under the heading curing.

One detail the record dwells on is the sawyer's lengthy inspection of each burl before cutting it; the direction of that first cut largely determines whether clean grain will come out of the block. Burls whose centers commonly show reddish rot or voids are set aside as unusable; this is one of the main reasons the waste rate in briar runs high. The figures given for burl age are observational estimates: roughly twenty years for a small example, and periods exceeding a hundred years for the large burls in storage. This range is consistent with technical sources stating that briar needs decades to reach a pipe-worthy size.

The Digger Problem

What's most cited about the text today is what it says about the cioccaioli who pull the wood from the ground. The work is done entirely with hand tools; extracting the burl without damaging it takes both effort and skill. According to reports, although diggers' earnings had improved by the mid-1980s, young workers weren't coming into the trade, and diggers under forty were almost nonexistent. For this reason, the notes stand as more than a travel memoir — they're an early record of the labor side of the briar trade.