Reggie Rackliff is nearing 1,000 axes — chop-chop — and has a story for each one.

Reggie Rackliff is the kind of guy who can turn just about any question into a good yarn.

Say, Reggie. Where did you get this particular ax?

“It was at an auction several years ago. A guy sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Are you going to bid on that ax?’ I said, ‘Why, yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to get it.’ I turned right around it my seat and said, “Now, why do you say that?’ And he said, ‘Because that’s worth $30-$35 and that’s what I’m going to pay for it.’ I looked him right square in the eye and said, ‘Well, you sure as hell ain’t going to get it.’ I ended up getting it. For about $65.”

Rackliff weaves a good story, all right, and why wouldn’t he? This is a fellow who lives in the woods of Industry where he has fields of oxen and longhorn steers, a Super Duty Ford with transmission woes, and an extended shed housing a collection of – prepare yourself – nearly 1,000 axes.

You heard right. Inside Rackliff’s shed-slash-workshop are roughly 970 axes of various ages and of various sizes and designs. Getting the tour of his odd, three-room shed, you get the feeling that Reggie can tell you a little something about every single ax in the place, and those little somethings will be fascinating.

But there’s one question that utterly stumps him, and it knocks him into a brief silence.

Say, Reggie. What made you get into ax collecting in the first place?

Rackliff frowns a little, squints at the ax he’s holding and says, “I don’t know.”

Not to worry. While Rackliff doesn’t completely understand the motivation that started it all, he does recollect a few things about the humble beginnings of his ax collection, believed to be the biggest of its kind in the state.

Reggie reaches for an ax, which resides with dozens of others in an upright, hand-made rack.

“This is the one that started it,” he says, “probably 35 years ago. It was made by the Underhill Edged Tool company out of Nashua, New Hampshire. For some reason I was able to hang on to it.”

After purchasing that ax, it would be another 30 years before Rackliff began collecting in earnest. Why the lull? No idea. When it was time to start gathering the tools for real, it came to him like an informed whisper from the subconscious. You might say he was poleaxed.

“I went down to Liberty Tool Company and I saw what we call a poleax for six bucks,” he recalls. “I came home without it. Now, it was 80 miles down there, one way. I came home and then got to thinking, I want that ax. That kind of started it.”

He made the long drive back to Liberty, forked over six bucks, and it was on.

“Boy, you’re not kidding,” he says. “When I started out, it was easy. I’d take my old Jeep Cherokee out and I come back with 30 axes in a day. Antique shops, secondhand shops, auctions . . . I have no problem going into an antique shop or a secondhand shop and saying ‘That’s too much money, I’m not going to pay it.’ That don’t bother me a bit, but you let me get in on an auction and I have no mercy. I have no mercy on my own checkbook.”

He doesn’t do yard sales, though. Rackliff is adamant about that. It hasn’t hindered him. The more he collected, the more contacts he made within the auction community. He began deep research, gathering up old tool catalogs and reference books. He knew where to look, when to look and what to bid.

“At the height of my collecting, I was buying 20 to 40 a weekend,” Rackliff says. “Some weekends you’d get six, but then you’d get a bumper weekend.”

A good bulk of his collection are axes made in Maine, in towns like Fayette, Poland, Madison, Phillips, Oakland, Chesterville and New Portland. These are tools from a time when every town had a blacksmith and every town dweller needed a good cutting tool.

“At one time,” Rackliff says, “there were 16 ax makers in Oakland alone.”

He wanders to the far side of the room where, above him, a rather stout-looking ax hangs on hooks. Compared to most, this one looks reasonably new. It’s labeled with the name of the maker, which in this case is Snow & Nealley out of Bangor.

“That’s my centerpiece, I guess,” Rackliff says. “I’ve been after it for more than a year. What really makes it the centerpiece is the weight. Your common ax is 3, 3-and-a-half pounds. Well, this one is 5 pounds. I heard it was a big ax; biggest you’re ever going to see. Finally a friend of mine up in Bingham was able to buy it, and he bought it with the intention of getting it into my collection.”

He has one ax — an embattled thing with scuffs, scars and half the handle gone — that dates back to the 1700s. It gets no special treatment, no place of honor among the others. He’s got axes with ash handles and axes with maple handles. He’s got ax heads in the Hudson Bay style, in the Connecticut style and in styles that were exclusive to a particular job.

Rackliff hoists an ax with a distinctive broad cutting blade.

“This is what’s called a sleeper ax,” he explains. “These were made to hew railroad ties. Railroad ties, back in the day, were called sleepers, because all they did was lay there. They designed this ax to hew the ties, so they call it a sleeper ax. And the guys that swung these were called tie hackers.”

He has an ax with an offset profile. It’s flat on one side, slightly curved on the other.

“That’s so when you’re hewing a beam,” Rackliff says, “your knuckles don’t get barked.”

The man knows his axes. He’s paid up to $100 for a single ax before. Sometimes you have to overpay, he says. Sometimes you get lucky and save some coin.

He also knows what’s popular at any given time.

“The Hudson Bay style, people jump through hoops to get one of these,” he says. “They’re light. You can use them one-handed.”

Into the rack goes the Hudson Bay and out comes a Connecticut style. “People are crazy over these right now, too,” he says.

Then there are the Jersey pattern axes, which he says “are very sought after.”

Rackliff likes talking about his axes and it shows. Every now and then, he gets asked to bring part of his collection (bringing the whole collection would be a feat) to the fairs or to an antique show. When people ask about his collection, they usually get a good story which, in turn, is also a history lesson.

“There’s a lot of provenance,” Rackliff says, “if you dig deep enough.”

He doesn’t name his axes. Rackliff rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the very notion. Which is not to say that he doesn’t have a personal connection with them.

“On rainy days, I’ll come out here and sit and think, ‘Oh, yeah. I forgot I had this.’ or ‘So, that’s where that ax ended up.'”

He spends part of winters repairing or replacing handles. This is a fellow who has oxen up in his back field and steer in a pasture down the road. Once in a while, Rackliff finds himself in need of a sturdy ax and he’s not hesitant to dip into his collection. It goes without saying that he knows which ax is right for any particular job.

“I was running fence line up in the woods today,” he says. “I took an old Maine ax with me. It was about 3 pounds and that was about just right.”

You’d think with nearly 1,000 axes staring at you, things would get redundant, but it doesn’t happen that way in Rackliff’s shed. The axes dominate, certainly, but there are other wonders to behold. There’s an old grindstone, with its wheel and pedal, sitting next to the door. There’s an old and rusted bear trap hanging on a wall. There are old tools that were once used for rolling logs, hauling blocks of ice, chopping snow off a work horse’s hoof, coaxing turpentine out of a pine tree, prying bark, lacing machine belts and countless other gadgets for countless other functions.

Rackliff spent more than two decades working in a sawmill, so he knows some of these tools by profession. Mostly, though, his knowledge evolved through research – study up on axes enough and you’re bound to learn other things.

“Back in the day, steel was worth more than gold,” he tells me, turning over in his hands an ax head made of both steel and iron. “You couldn’t put a gold bit on an ax because it’s too soft.”

That story segues into another and then another after that. Rackliff shows me yet another ax, this one initialed by the temperer (one Pearly Pulsifer) and explains how he knows it was made in 1934 in Oakland.

“There’s a lot of history in Maine as far as tool making,” he says.

On the day I visited, Rackliff had already picked up three new axes (new to him, that is) for his collection, inching him ever closer to an even 1,000. That will be a milestone, no doubt, but it seems unlikely that it will mark the end. Other axes with fresh stories are always out there to entice him to buy just one more.

“You think you’ve got them all,” Rackliff begins. “I just found, on eBay, a 4-pound Snow & Nealley. And I didn’t know they made them.”

So the collection just grows and grows, and where she stops, nobody knows. A cursory search on the internet reveals a few interesting tidbits about Mainers who stumbled upon rare or exotic axes, but very little about sprawling collections like Rackliff’s.

“I believe I’ve got the biggest collection in the state,” he says. “I was told by a guy in Massachusetts that there’s some guy in Maine who has 3,000, but nobody has given me a name.”

He mulls that a bit. Now, why would someone make up a story like that if it wasn’t true?

“Sometimes people just say things like that,” Rackliff says, looking across the room where dizzying rows of ax heads stare back. “Because . . . you know.”

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