INSIDE AN UTTERLY NONDESCRIPT HANGAR-SIZE SHED across from the small rural airport in Cambridge, Maryland, Ken Knox runs a flourishing industrial business from another century. “We have equipment from 1900 and before working here,” he allows matter-of-factly. “This piece right here is from 1905. All this stuff”—he sweeps his hand across a roomful of dark iron forms, grimy with whole lifetimes of constant use—“you can’t buy now. I hate to think what it would cost to start a barrel business today.”

The Brooks Barrel Company is a slack cooperage, one of four surviving in the United States. “There are quite a few makers of tight barrels, for wine and whiskey and so forth,” Knox says, “but slack barrels, which used to be used to ship everything from nails to meat to nuts, were already disappearing when Paul Brooks started this company, in 1950. He began by repairing old barrels. Then as cooperages closed down around the country, he bought up their old machines and started making the barrels himself.” Ken Knox joined the company in 1978, and he became boss when Brooks retired in 1991.

A century ago the Eastern Shore of Maryland had a whole barrel-making industry drawing on its stands of good yellow pine. Brooks Barrel still buys pine logs from nearby; a sawmill crew out back chops them on a log cutter and then, using a specialized saw with an eighteeninch cylindrical blade and a plate indicating a patent date of 1893, slices the pieces into curved staves wider in the middle. After the edges are beveled and the finished staves are cured in the outside air for a couple of weeks, the barrel takes shape on a five-in-one machine.

The five-in-one looks torturous, a circle of overhead arms and blades poised to descend. Its operator hammers fourteen to eighteen staves in place around the inside of a steel hoop called a setup ring and then switches on the machine; six arms come down and clamp the staves together into a barrel shape, fat in the middle and narrower at the ends; a hoop is forced down around the top, and then a blade lowers to cut a groove around the inside for the barrel head. The arms pull back up, and the operator lifts out the barrel, then knocks off the setup ring and tosses it aside. All this happens in one swift movement. Brooks has six five-in-ones, all probably dating from the 1910s. They were made in Buffalo, New York, when it was a heavy-industry metropolis with a long, bright future.

“I’ll tell you what’s our most valuable machine,” Knox says. “That would be the Worthington hoop machine. I never could find a plate on it, so we don’t know when it was made, but I know Paul bought it in Chicago forty-some years ago, when a big old cooper went out of business there. It’s irreplaceable, and there’s only one other left anywhere. We’d be out of business without it.” The Worthington is a behemoth, twenty feet long, grimy, and dark. It takes rolled steel off a turntable, shears it to a width of a bit more than an inch, punches holes in the ends, and then rolls the edges up.

Next to it is a smaller hoop machine for smaller barrels, bearing a 1903 patent date and a Joliet, Illinois, pedigree. The bigger hoops proceed to the hoop expander, a sort of iron tabletop with twelve concentric arms that press outward inside a hoop to make one of its edges wider than the other, to fit tightly around a barrel’s wider middle.

There’s a deafening racket when all this aged machinery is running, and every time the phone rings, a fun-house buzzer blares even louder. How many barrels come out of this clangor? “I knew you’d ask that,” Knox says, frowning, “and I should know the answer. Barrels and planters combined, we probably make a couple of hundred thousand a year.

“The planters are basically just barrels cut in two; you use either end on your patio. Our barrels have quite a few important uses. They remain the best way to ship oysters, because they’re so much more durable than cardboard. And they’re the best for railroad spikes. Imagine what happens when you drop a metal barrel on the third rail. And any time you see a keg in a store filled with horehound candy or coffee beans, chances are that it’s one of ours.

“I notice our barrels everywhere. When I travel around the country, I see our planters in front of people’s homes, in their gardens. I see them on TV. In commercials. My little girl pointed one out on ‘Sesame Street’ not long ago.”

Looking around the turn-of-the-century operation he keeps thriving near the turn of another century, he adds, “I feel lucky to be making such a unique product, even though with this machinery we have to do practically all the maintenance ourselves. We sharpen all our own joiner knives on that grinder there.” It has a patent date of October 31,1883.

“I enjoy all of it. In fact”—he looks me in the eye—“I’d like not to do anything else with my life.”