On a sunny, warm day in downtown Haines, Dave Pahl is determined to show and not tell what’s going wrong with the nearly 20-foot-tall hammer that stands outside of the Hammer Museum.
He stoops down to a spot at the base where the wood looks flimsy, reached inside the handle and pulled out a handful of damp, deteriorating pieces.
He grinned. “You could almost make coffee with that.”
A little further up the dark spruce, a mushroom is growing.
The Hammer Museum is kicking off a fundraising campaign to replace the handle on a decades-old nearly 20-foot tall hammer sitting in front of its Main Street location on Sept. 16, 2024, in Haines.
It’s the original handle for the now iconic hammer that was installed in 2007.
It was installed when the then five-year-old museum was trying to make a name for itself or, at the very least, catch the occasional tourist’s eye.
“We’d watch people walking down the street and they’d just be walking ahead. They’d look over here and it just looks like somebody’s house, yeah?” Pahl said they didn’t have a sign on the roof at that point. “We needed to attract attention.”
So, he built the nearly 20-foot-tall hammer out of a spruce log that was in the woods near his house.
“That’s part of the problem,” he said. “It had sat for like, at least, four years on the ground,” Pahl said. “So it had a bad start to begin with. It had a little bit of rot going on right from the beginning.”
Now that rot has progressed to the point that the museum is launching a campaign to replace it.
And, while they’re just launching the campaign, Pahl said they’re already three-quarters of the way to a $15,000 goal thanks to a few donations that came in earlier this year.
“We wanted to be able to buy a log and start looking right away,” Pahl said.
That cedar log came in from Petersburg on AML on Oct. 1.
It’s bound for Terry Jacobson’s house on Inlet Drive. He said he’ll start work carving and shaping it into a new handle in his yard before he moves it into his shop for winter.
“I think it’ll take a month … if I’m working constantly on it,” said Jacobson, who plans to be in Hawaii from November through April so he likely won’t finish the project until spring.
Jacobson, who said he’s going with a classic hammer handle shape, said he’s a little nervous about working on the log.
“I may have to borrow my son’s backhoe so I can turn it around,” he said.
Pahl said the group plans to have it in place by May or June of 2025, but they’re still looking for financial help to pay for the work and installation of the new hammer handle.
“We’re hoping that the community will reach out and help our big hammer project along,” Pahl said.
The museum plans to launch a campaign on First Friday in October. Donations can be made at First National Bank, “Tell them they want to donate to the big hammer campaign,” Pahl said, or at Talia’s Treasures, where people can set their accounts to donate to the cause.
The group is also planning a lamp-repair clinic to raise money for the project.
In the meantime, Pahl said he could use some help this fall decorating the current hammer for the holiday season. Pahl said he’d like to continue the tradition, but the last time he crawled up the ladder to do it, things got a little wobbly.
“[I] need someone with younger knees to help decorate it,” he said. “We need younger knees on the [museum] board, too, for that matter.”