The Shed as a Historian’s Laboratory

Some historians pore over libraries and archives, some interview witnesses and examine wagon wheel ruts, and still others fill card catalogs. I go out to a shed.

I call it Mossbunker, after the humble Atlantic menhaden — the small, oily fish that once nourished fields of maize in New England. According to tradition, Squanto taught the Pilgrims to drop a few mossbunkers into the ground alongside their kernels of corn, ensuring a rich harvest. My Mossbunker serves the same symbolic purpose: it is a place where ideas are sown, fertilized, and eventually grow into the books, blogs, podcasts, and videos I share with the world.

This is Mossbunker during construction. The man on the left was the foreman.

I am afraid I was more in the way, helping in any way possible and learning more all the time.

Mossbunker is modest: 120 square feet with a wood floor and metal roof, built in 2021-22, in the throes of the pandemic, from recycled and repurposed materials. Friends from the village helped me raise its frame. Or should I say I helped them? Lined with hundreds of volumes of bound books, the shed hums with the presence of past scholars — a laboratory of history in miniature. Though not yet fully finished (I still plan to clad the exterior in cedar shingles before winter sets in), it already carries the feel of a sanctuary, complete with months of dust.

I am hardly the first historian to retreat into such a space. David McCullough famously wrote his masterworks from a writing shed at his home. For him, the separation was essential: a simple outbuilding became a threshold. Step inside, and the world receded; the only thing left was the work.

That is the same spirit I find in Mossbunker. Its metal roof rattles under Nebraska rains, its books whisper when I reach for them, its reclaimed wood reminds me that the past is never wasted. Here, among these quiet walls, I chase the stories of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Mary Queen of Scots, and others — not as dead relics, but as living voices that speak into our time.

Every historian needs a laboratory. Mine just happens to look like a fisherman’s hut turned book-lined chapel, fertilized with memory and imagination.