About

I was born in Norwalk, Ohio on April 29, 1951. My father told me that I came into this world at dawn after the passage of a violent thunderstorm. He and his best friend, Leo, were sitting on the front steps of the old Memorial Hospital watching a glorious sunrise through the receding clouds when they got the word.  I sometimes wonder how this event would have been interpreted had it happened in a hut beside the Huron River ten or more centuries earlier!

 

Even as a young kid, I felt that I was somehow different. To put it mildly, I believe that those around me thought I was just plain weird. My love for history and things old manifested itself very early, and indeed, my great-grandfather, Floyd Hill, was a collector of all sorts of relics, old swords and guns, with a few arrowheads thrown in. I still have a worn-out drill made of shiny black Coshocton chert that my grandmother gave me when I was about 8 years old. She told me it was all that was left of his great collection.

 

I never did very well in grade school, too much daydreaming about things historical. The summer of 1965 saw me experimenting with a nail, trying to pressure chip glass bottle bottoms into points I could haft on dowel rods and shoot with a bow I made from strips of split bamboo. To say the least, my parents were none too happy about the way things were going and did what they could to discourage me from messing around with stuff like that. This was the mid-1960s, and if a father had a good business going, his son was expected to follow in his footsteps. After all these years, those who have come to know me couldn't possibly imagine me as a maker of rubber stamps working in a dingy little factory in New London, Ohio. My stubbornness saved me from that fate, along with some help from the fine people I hung out with, rock hounds, Indian relic collectors, and old gun cranks.

 

In high school, I reached the "height of academic achievement" when I took my science fair project, "Early Man and His Tools and Weapons," all the way to the state level with perfect scores. I bribed the judges with arrowheads I made during my presentations. Obviously, my Flint working skills were improving! The only "higher education” I received came from two years as a part-time student at the Firelands Campus of Bowling Green State University.  There, I took a few courses in English composition, Geology, and Anthropology, hoping someday to transfer to a bigger school that offered a degree in Paleo-Anthropology. By then, my interest in archaeology had pretty much won out over all the others, in part due to my flintknapping, in which I had now progressed to where I could make a passable replica of just about any point type found in my home state. However, this dream never came true. My family had disintegrated in a nasty divorce, and while working for my dad, I was moonlighting in the flintknapping business, the profits of which I could not ignore.  And, it soon became evident that I could make it on my own, practicing the trade I had taught myself.

 

In April of 1974, I married Valerie, my best friend, confidant, and business partner. If she, with her patience and talent as a fine artist, had not been with me, those early years would have been very lonely and a lot tougher. I was 23, and she was 19 when we packed up the old AMC Hornet and headed for the Ozark Hills of southwestern Missouri. Here was a place where old-time craftsmen were respected for who they were, and mine was the oldest craft of all. There was plenty of free raw material; those hills were loaded with chert, a rock the locals hated. In some places, there was more of it than soil, and they told me I could have it if I took it all and left the dirt for them! Of course, only a small fraction of it was workable, and that came in angular blocks of odd shape, the same as the old Flint Ridge material. So I didn't have much trouble with it, and it was eagerly added to my stockpile along with the Ohio stuff and the cantaloupe-sized Indiana Hornstone nodules I had delivered to my booth at Friendship, Indiana. Up until the advent of the first knap-ins, this was the big muzzle-loading shoot we used to attend, along with a few of the smaller rendezvous.

 

We had bought an old Spartan trailer that we had set up in a trailer park next to Wilderness Settlement. Here, we rented a booth we called The Flint Shop, and hung a sign over the door. Back then Wilderness Settlement was on West Hwy 76, at the edge of the city of Branson, and it was vary convenient because all we had to do to get to our booth was hop the fence. We kept that both for about a year and a half, however, after seeing how cheap the tourists were we began to supplement our income with mail order and more frequent trips to shows. Our first mail order catalog featured a tin type of the wife and me on the front cover. Finding out that there was already a Flint Shop in Texas that made gunflints from sawed slabs we changed our name to Mound Builder Arts and Trading Co. The Hopewell Mound Builders were my favorite prehistoric people who did a lot of fine artwork and traded extensively, the same thing we were doing. Shortly after our name change, in 1975, we came out with our second catalog and published the first edition of The Art of Flint Knapping under the Mound Builder Books label. Over the following 50 years this book was to go through five more revisions and today it is affectionately referred to as "The Flint Knappers Bible" by those who first learned to chip using it as their only reference.

 

The Art of flint Knapping was followed by Flint Types of the Continental United States in 1976, and we moved to our own place ten miles east of Branson in 1978. The moving and rebuilding of a 150 year old log house and the construction of other outbuildings occupied a lot of our spare time. So, it wasn't until 1985 that I wrote the first edition of The Art of Making Primitive Bows and Arrows, and Val finally finished the drawings for Story in Stone. Replacing the first flint types book this volume went to press in 1987. To say the least it set a new standard for lithic illustrations that was to make Val famous in that field.

 

Furthering our endeavors in the publishing business in 1989 Val and I took over Ray Harwood's newsletter, Flint Knapping Digest, and renamed it CHIPS. With the addition of Dane and Mary Martin to the “CHIPS Staff” it became a full fledged quarterly magazine that effectively served the flintknapping community for 23 years. After the death of Val in 2005, and then Dane in 2009, that left only me and Marry to run the magazine. Due to competition with the internet, and our not being able to attend all the knap-ins where we used to pick up new subscribers and re-up old ones, it was no longer profitable enough to keep it going. The October, 2011 issue of CHIPS would be the last. With Marry moving back to Washington State, and passing away there, I am now the last surviving member of the illustrious CHIPS Staff!

 

Soon after Val’s death I set about mastering the art of “desk-top publishing” so I could produce my CHIPS articles without any outside help. This came in handy when I had to put together the last six issues all by myself! In a few short years I went form setting articles in the magazine to building whole books! To say the least, I take the same care and pride in my publications as I do in my flint work! After CHIPS went bye-bye I set about re-editing and rebuilding The Best of CHIPS series and later much more went into the five books of the Master Knapper’s Guide series. Look for them in the Books page of this site.

 

In 1989 with the advent of inexpensive home video cameras and recorders we made a couple of knap-in tapes which we had to copy one at a time. This got old when we started making numerous copies of our first instructional video in 1992. The old VHS equipment couldn’t handle the volume, so we went to a local "dubber" to have multiple copies made. This is when we ran into technical problems with time codes and quality control that were solved when we bought our first Super VHS camera, accompanying editing decks, and a duplication amp that fed 10 VCRS so we could dub 10 tapes at a time. A considerable investment back then, but it was well worth it!  With this new equipment we produced The Art of Flint Knapping Video Companion in 1993 followed by more instructional videos we made for ourselves and others. Originally, the Companion was designed to accompany the book and on its own has become something of a "cult film." In 2006, I digitally re-edited and re-mastered the Companion along with the others for distribution in DVD format that I’m now burning on a duplicating machine that can handle 6 discs at a time. Throughout the shooting of all our early videos Val was my camera person, and a damn good one. We had the same eye for scenes and she shot the footage I needed when editing the productions. After her death the last three videos that I “starred” in were shot and edited in high def digital format by Charles Eaton.  

 

Alone, I’m still running the publishing business and trying to maintain the quality of service you all have come to expect while still managing to find time to do some chipping. To view the pieces I have currently available in Flint Jack’s Gallery click on “Shop Points” to view all in the order they were made and posted. The most recent are at the top. Or, you can click on the categories on the sidebar to select by period or type, and to go to the other categories such as books, DVDs, posters, and more. 

 

By the way, the original Flint Jack, AKA Edward Simpson, was a well-known English flint knapper in the 1850s, who figured out how to reproduce early stone tools for a then thriving relic market. However, unlike my predecessor, my work is signed with my initials, two digit year date and a serial number for that year. The daggers and axes I make are numbered consecutively from 1983 and bear D or A prefixes. Keeping the above in mind when you buy a signed Waldorf point you know who made it!  And at my age, who knows how many more there will be?

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​I hope you will be pleased with this website!  And, remember to keep logging in to check for new items, especially in the Gallery, where things are changing constantly. Enjoy. DCW