The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgAuthor: Harold B. GillEditor: Thomas K. FordRelease date: November 21, 2018 [eBook #58318]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACKSMITH IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WILLIAMSBURG ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgAuthor: Harold B. GillEditor: Thomas K. FordRelease date: November 21, 2018 [eBook #58318]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: The Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg

Author: Harold B. GillEditor: Thomas K. Ford

Author: Harold B. Gill

Editor: Thomas K. Ford

Release date: November 21, 2018 [eBook #58318]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACKSMITH IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WILLIAMSBURG ***

THEBLACKSMITHin Eighteenth-CenturyWILLIAMSBURGAn Account of his Life & Times and of his CraftWilliamsburg Craft SeriesWILLIAMSBURGPublished byColonial WilliamsburgMCMLXXVIII

An Account of his Life & Times and of his Craft

Williamsburg Craft Series

WILLIAMSBURGPublished byColonial WilliamsburgMCMLXXVIII

Decorative capital

“Iron seemeth a simple metal, but in its nature are many mysteries,” wrote Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century English churchman. To the contrary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, two centuries later, found nothing mysterious about the worker in iron. His brawny blacksmith (long hair and all) embodied every simple virtue: he owed money to no man, prayed in church on Sundays, and earned an honest living by the sweat of his honest brow.

Longfellow may have realized that he was penning a swan song for the village blacksmith, whose forge and anvil could not last far into the factory age. Most probably, however, the poet did not think of himself as reducing to the level of small-town banality the lusty craftsman whose precursors forged thunderbolts for the gods.

To primitive peoples, it seems, there has always been something supernatural about the smith. He tamed fire to his will. He turned the ores of earth into magic and invincible weapons, or into prosaically peaceful tools. He himself became a god: Osiris of Egypt, Hephaestus to the ancient Greeks, Vulcan of Roman theology, Odin in Norse myth. Or he turned into a whole race of demigods—giant Cyclops or dwarf Nibelungs—having mystical skills in metalwork.

Down through all recorded civilizations man has valued gold as the most precious of metals. Yet in every civilization sinceman learned to smelt and forge it, iron has in fact been the metal most valuable to him.

The paradox is more apparent than real. Iron is a common metal, and (with steel) can be put to an almost unlimited variety of uses—including the working of other metals. Its real value to man is utilitarian, although it may be employed for decorative and even monetary purposes. Gold, on the other hand, although of somewhat limited usefulness, is comparatively rare and is valued more for that than for its durable beauty.

It was, in part, the hope of finding gold—as the Spanish had found it in Mexico and Peru—that moved Sir Walter Raleigh to send colonizing ventures to North America. But any resource that might bring wealth to the gentlemen adventurers in London and to England itself was not to be overlooked. Thomas Hariot, one of those who reached Roanoke Island with Raleigh’s initial colonists in 1585, reported that:

In two places of the countrey specially, one about fourescore, & the other six score miles from the fort or place where we dwelt, we found nere the water side the ground to be rocky, which by the triall of a Minerall man was found to hold iron richly. It is found in many places of the country els.

Around the edges of a brass clock face made in England about 1750 and now in the possession of Colonial Williamsburg, some unknown engraver depicted ironworking operations. Here, above the numbers 11 and 12 on the clock face, open-pit miners are shown digging and hauling ore.

Nothing further is known of these discoveries, including their exact location, for the Roanoke colony did not survive. But the settlement made in 1607 at Jamestown did endure. Sending carefulinstructions, the sponsoring Virginia Company of London directed the adventurers to Virginia to look not only for gold but for iron ore. Among the first group of settlers was George Read, a blacksmith, to be joined the following year by Richard Dole of the same craft, and Peter Keffer, gunsmith.

No doubt some of these workers in iron—perhaps all three of them—had a hand in the experimental smelting and forging of local bog iron during Jamestown’s first year or two. Captain John Smith reported that the colony’s “best commoditie was Iron which we made into little chissels.” Archaeological excavations at Jamestown and at nearby Denbigh Plantation in recent years have disclosed the sites of what appear to have been small furnaces for smelting iron ore.

At the same time, the colonists were shipping ore back to England, seven tons of iron being smelted at Bristol from Virginia ore as early as 1608. Four years later, William Strachey wrote:

Sir Tho: Dale hath mencioned in his Letters to the [Worthies?] of the Councell of a goodly Iron myne, and Capt Newport hath brought home of that mettell so sufficient a tryall, as there hath bene made 16. or 17. tonne of Iron, so good as the East Indian Marchants bought that of the Virginian Company, preferring that before any other Iron of what Country soever.

A conjectural sketch, after Sidney King, of an earthen furnace for smelting iron. Furnaces such as this were used in England early in the seventeenth century, and similar ones may have been used at Jamestown.

In further pursuit of its determination to set up an iron industry in Virginia, the London Company advertised for blacksmiths, bellows makers, edgetool makers, cutlers, armorers, gunsmiths, iron miners, iron refiners, iron founders, hammermen, millwrights for iron mills, and colliers for charcoal making.Before theMayflowerleft old Plymouth with its cargo of religious refugees, more than one hundred workmen having the required skills had sailed to Virginia, some of them to set up a full-scale ironworks at Falling Creek, about sixty miles up the James River from Jamestown.

How much iron was actually produced at the Falling Creek furnace and forge, whether largely pig iron, sow iron, or wrought iron, and whether consumed in the colony, shipped to England, or some of both, must remain matters of conjecture. A series of troubles plagued the project, but by 1619 the blast furnace, finery, forge, and chafery were reported to be “in some good forwardnesse, and a proofe is sent ofIronmade there.” Two years later a new manager was sent over, and he promised “to finish the Works & have plentiful provision of Iron ... by next Easter.”

The forecast was fateful. Easter in 1622 fell on March 24. But on the morning of Good Friday, March 22, the Indians of Virginia fell on every English settlement along the James River, massacring more than 350 colonists, including 27 at Falling Creek. The redskins not only slaughtered the entire adult complement of ironworkers, but destroyed the buildings and supposedly heaved some of the machinery into the river nearby. The exact details are understandably a little vague, but the result was conclusive: the iron industry in Virginia was ended for nearly one hundred years.

Except for bloomeries, which could have existed in every colony, the first successful ironworks in British America began production about 1645 at Saugus, Massachusetts. (In a bloomery operation a lump of iron ore—usually bog iron—is heated until it is semimolten, and then is hammered on the anvil until most impurities have been forced out; with much labor in this manner, small quantities of excellent wrought iron can be produced.) TheSaugus works have been reconstructed after careful archaeological and historical research; a sort of family resemblance is to be presumed between them and the ironworks built in Virginia early in the eighteenth century.

The Hammersmith ironworks on the Saugus River in Massachusetts as they are believed to have looked in 1650. Along with documentary records, extensive remains found below ground at the site—and some above—have permitted a careful rebuilding of the entire complex. Redrawn after an architectural rendering in the Saugus Museum.

Governor Alexander Spotswood re-launched the iron industry in Virginia with the financial backing of several gentlemen in the colony and in England, and with the skilled labor of immigrant ironworkers from Germany. By 1718 it appears that his Tubal works, near the confluence of the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers, were in production, although he had not yet received the London government’s permission even to start the project.

Fourteen years later Spotswood (by then out of office) told William Byrd II of Westover that iron mines and blast furnaces were operating at four locations in Virginia. Byrd visited and described those at Tubal, not far from Germanna, at Fredericksville, and at Massaponax (now called New Post) below Fredericksburg. Spotswood had an interest in the second, and was sole proprietor of the first and third, having bought out his original backers.

The fourth was at Accokeek, near the Potomac, on land belonging to Augustine Washington, whose son George had just been born. Byrd, who did not get that far on his 1732 “Progress to the Mines,” nevertheless confidently reported that “Matters are very well managed there, and no expense is spared to make themprofitable, which is not the case in the works I have already mentioned.” This judgment may have been accurate for all we know, but it seems unkind of Byrd to throw the only bouquet to the one place he had not seen while dropping brickbats on the men who had been so hospitable and helpful to him.

His criticism was certainly well founded in one case. The furnace at Fredericksville (a place no longer on the map) had been idle the entire summer. Somewhat like the rider who was lost for want of a horseshoe nail, here the blast furnace could not operate even though ore, limestone, charcoal, waterpower, and skilled labor were all available. The missing “nail” in this case was corn. There was not enough to feed the oxen that hauled the carts that carried the ore from mine to furnace and the sows from furnace to dockside on the Rappahannock some twenty-four miles away.

Byrd, who had a notion to become an ironmaster himself, was advised that a proper works required, besides an iron deposit nearby, a constant supply of waterpower to operate the bellows, easy access to deep water for shipping the output to England, at least two miles square of woodland to supply charcoal for a “moderate” furnace, and 120 slaves to do the work, including some to grow food for both men and beasts. Two bits of advice, which he recorded as follows, may have dissuaded him from taking the plunge:

If all these circumstances happily concur, and you could procure honest colliers and firemen, which will be difficult to do....The founders find it very hot work to tend the furnace, especially in summer, and are obliged to spend no small part of their earnings in strong drink to recruit their spirits.

If all these circumstances happily concur, and you could procure honest colliers and firemen, which will be difficult to do....

The founders find it very hot work to tend the furnace, especially in summer, and are obliged to spend no small part of their earnings in strong drink to recruit their spirits.

Spotswood’s Tubal works were producing, in 1723, castiron “backs and frames for Chymmes [chimneys], Potts, doggs, frying, stewing and baking pans.” But even at the time of Byrd’s trip, the output of the four Virginia furnaces consisted almost entirely of cast iron sows and pigs that were shipped to England.There was not a single forge operating in the whole of Virginia, Spotswood told Byrd.

Just three years later, however, Governor William Gooch reported to the Board of Trade in London that one forge was producing bar iron. He seemed to think this was enough to satisfy the colony’s needs for iron “for agriculture and Planting, for mending as well as making tools.” How badly Gooch misjudged the local demand for wrought iron is evident in the rapid increase of forges in the following years. A number sprang up near the lower Potomac and in the Shenandoah Valley; one, called Holt’s Forge, was erected sometime before 1755 between Williamsburg and Richmond at what is now Providence Forge. Its output just before the Revolution included bar iron and such plantation supplies as plow hoes, broad hoes, hilling hoes, grubbing hoes with steel edges, nails, and axes.

Legally, no colonial forge with trip hammer, rolling mill to fashion wrought iron plate, or slitting mill to turn the plate into bars could be built after Parliament passed the Iron Act of 1750. But the law seems to have had little effect, and Virginia smiths called for more and more bar iron to make farm tools and ironwork for wagons, mills, and ships.

The demand was so great that most bar iron produced in the colonies was consumed by local blacksmiths. In 1764, for example, Colonel John Tayloe, who owned ironworks in King George County, found he could sell his whole output locally. Robert Carter, the planter-entrepreneur of Nomini Hall and partner in the Baltimore iron Works, sold large quantities of bar iron in Williamsburg and to blacksmiths elsewhere in Virginia.

By 1770 William Hunter’s works at Falmouth, said to be the largest in America at that time, were turning one and one-half tons of pig iron into bars every day. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson, who had a small interest in three blast furnaces in his home county of Albermarle and who later owned a nail making machine and sold its output, counted eight ironworks in Virginia. He reported that they produced about 4,400 tons of pig iron and more than 900 tons of bar iron annually.

Two blacksmiths and a gunsmith, as we have seen, came to Jamestown with the earliest settlers, recruited for the obvious reason that their crafts were vital to the survival of any settlement in the wilderness. From the start, both the London Company and the colonial assembly tried to persuade smiths to migrate, and, when they reached the New World, to practice their craft.

By way of encouragement, the assembly exempted from taxes and levies artisans who engaged in their crafts and did not plant tobacco. In 1657, in order to assure smiths, tanners, and weavers ample raw materials to work with, it forbade the exportation of iron, hides, and wool. This latter law had a checkered career: it was repealed the next year, reenacted two years later, repealed as a failure after eleven years, reenacted once more after another eleven years, and immediately repealed by royal order as a threat to the trade and commerce of England.

Through it all the supply of working smiths remained small in the colony of Virginia, and their charges skyrocketed. The county courts were given regulatory powers “by reason of the unconscionable rates, [that] smiths do exact on the inhabitants of this countrey for their worke.” Later and for another reason—the runaway inflation that accompanied the Revolution—prices of many commodities were commonly fixed. For instance, the price of bar iron (a consumer item for smiths) was set by a Williamsburg town meeting of July 16, 1779, at 800 shillings per ton and eightpence per pound “for the present month.”

Shown in this illustration from Joseph Moxon’sMechanick Exercises, published in several eighteenth-century editions in London, are the basic pieces of equipment in a blacksmith’s shop—then and since. Actually, the bellows connection shown is faulty: the draft must come up through the firebed, not blow across the top of it.

Actually the greatest obstacles to the growth in seventeenth-century Virginia of any large manufactory of iron and steel articles were the scarcities of cash money and, even more simply, of towns. Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, in their report to the London Board of Trade, entitledThe Present State of Virginia, and the College, described the situation in 1697:

For want of Towns, Markets, and Money, there is but little Encouragement for Tradesmen and Artificers, and therefore little Choice of them, and their Labour very dear in the Country. A Tradesman having no Opportunity of a Market where he can buy Meat, Milk, Corn, and all other things, must either make Corn, keep Cows, and raise Stocks himself, or must ride about the Country to buy Meat and Corn where he can find it; and then is puzzled to find Carriers, Drovers, Butchers, Salting (for he can’t buy one Joynt or two) and a great many other Things, which there would be no Occasion for, if there were Towns and Markets. Then a great deal of the Tradesman’s Time being necessarily spent in going and coming to and from his Work, in dispers’d Country Plantations, and his Pay being generally in straggling Parcels of Tobacco, the Collection whereof costs about 10 per Cent. and the best of this Pay coming but once a Year, so that he cannot turn his Hand frequently with a small Stock, as Tradesmen do in England and elsewhere, all this occasions the Dearth of all Tradesmen’s Labour, and likewise the Discouragement, Scarcity, and Insufficiency of Tradesmen.

When James Blair and his co-authors wrote of the difficulties faced by artificers, Williamsburg was about to be made the capital of the Virginia colony. Seventy years later Williamsburg was enjoying the height of its golden age—but the soil continued less than fertile for the growth of large-scale and urban iron workshops. Governor Fauquier reported to the board of Trade in 1766:

There is but one manufactory of the least importance carried on in this Colony, which is, the making of Iron both in pigs and barrs, which receives no publick encouragement, and which when made is chiefly exported to Great Britain. But ... every gentleman of much property in land and negroes have some of their own negroes bred up in the trade of blacksmiths, and make axes, hoes, ploughshares, and such kind of coarse work for the use of their plantations. I do not know that there is a white-smith or maker of cutlery in the Colony.

Fauquier’s report may be discounted as a politically motivated effort to allay the home government’s suspicions that the colonists were engaging too heavily in iron manufacture. As a matter of fact, there was a whitesmith (that is, tinsmith or worker in white metal) by the name of John Bell in Williamsburg at the time Fauquier wrote. Records of the period mention cutlers at work in Williamsburg and elsewhere in the colony. But the pointof paramount significance in his report lies in the undeniable fact that agricultural blacksmithing—and Virginia was an almost entirely agricultural colony—took place on the individual plantations. In addition to Negro slaves, some indentured servants, free journeymen, and master craftsmen—the latter occasionally itinerant—could be found working at their craft on farms throughout the colony.

Robert Carter, member of the council and sometime owner of a large home next to the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, had workers on his plantations, white and black apparently, trained as coopers, carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, millers, sailors, bricklayers, shoemakers, and in other skills. He sold iron articles made on his Nomini Hall plantation to his neighbors for cash or produce—such items as hoes, axes, plows, and nails. Although Carter was by no means typical, he being one of Virginia’s wealthiest and most successful farm entrepreneurs, the example of plantation blacksmithing could be repeated many times over.

An instance of the availability of indentured servants is found in the 1773 advertisement of James Mills in theVirginia Gazette:

Justarrived theSuccess’s Increase, CaptainCurtis, with about eighty choice healthy Servants, among whom are many Tradesmen, viz. Shoemakers, Weavers, Carpenters, Black and White Smiths, Tailers, a Sailmaker, a Tanner, a Glazier and Painter, a Bricklayer, a Brass Founder, a Turner, an Upholsterer, Surgeons, and Apothecaries, Hair Dressers, Schoolmasters and Book-Keepers, with many Farmers, Labourers, &c. &c. The sale will commence atLeedsTown, on Monday the 3d ofJanuaryand will continue till all are sold. Reasonable Credit will be allowed.... Tobacco will be taken in Payment for the above.

John Tait, another planter, wrote to England for a blacksmith who was “accustomed to coarse Country work,” such as hoes and axes, to be indentured for four or five years and to receive £10 sterling per year in wages, plus “meat, drink, washing & lodging.” Francis Jerdone, a planter and merchant of Louisa County, had an indentured servant who did all of the plantation’s blacksmithing and also brought in as much £7 in one month of 1767 for work done for neighboring farmers. Thefollowing bill of John Cock indicates the kinds of work done by rural Virginia blacksmiths and the prices they charged in 1759:

When the Virginia Assembly first met in 1699 at Middle Plantation (soon to be renamed Williamsburg), its members listened to speeches delivered by several students at the brand new College of William and Mary. Urging that the colony’s capital should be moved thence from Jamestown, one of the students pointed out that Middle Plantation already contained “as many substantial housekeepers ... as is to be found again in the whole County.” He specifically listed a smith’s shop asone of several “great helps and advances made towards the beginning of a town.”

Despite the young speaker’s effort to make it sound impressive, Middle Plantation was far from being a town by any stretch of the word. But it was no accident that a mere scraggle of structures in a landscape of woods and fields included a smithy. As in the first years at Jamestown, the presence of a blacksmith to make and mend tools was essential to the success of the settlement. Unfortunately, nothing is known of the identity of that first Williamsburg smith—not his name, or the exact location of his shop, or the kind of work he did.

The Brush-Everard House is one of some eighty original structures now restored to their colonial appearance in Williamsburg.

John Brush was the earliest Williamsburg smith whose name is known today. He was primarily a gunsmith and armorer, but may have done blacksmithing too. He bought two lots in the shadow of the Governor’s Palace in 1717, and the modest home he built there (later enlarged by Thomas Everard) still stands on Palace Green. So far as surviving records have revealed, he was followed by no more than fourteen individuals over the next three-quarters of a century who worked iron and steel in one ormore of the smithy crafts: blacksmith, gunsmith, locksmith, cutler, nailmaker, and farrier.

Only fourteen. Even granting the possibility that some blacksmiths never left their name or mark in a written record, this seems remarkably few for so long a period in one of Virginia’s chief towns. The small number can probably be taken as another indication that most of the colony’s smiths—like eighty to ninety percent of its population—lived and worked in the country.

Surviving advertisements, invoices, and inventories of Williamsburg blacksmiths suggest that the work they did was of a somewhat different nature from that of the rural smith. The following extracts from account books of James Anderson and Thomas Pate indicate something of the urban variety:

It will be noticed that Pate made or repaired several items “for the mill.” No doubt this was the windmill shown on the “Frenchman’s Map” of 1782 as standing on or near Custis’s property to the south of town. The millwright, the wheelwright, the coachmaker, and the shipwright all depended heavily on the blacksmith to produce essential parts of their respective products. The builder of houses, too, could do little without the nails and the tools that came from the local smithy.

However, when the “public hospital, for persons of insane and disordered minds” was built in Williamsburg in 1771, the removable iron gratings and padlocks to be installed at all the windows were imported from England. For this large specialty job, even James Anderson, the town’s foremost smith, was passed over. Similarly, wrought-iron gates and balconies on the public buildings of Williamsburg appear to have been ordered from England. The Capitol was to have “on each Side ... an Iron Balcony upon the first Floor,” and the assembly explicitly empowered the overseers in charge of building both the first Capitol and the Governor’s Palace to send to England for ironwork, glass, and other materials necessary.

Likewise, the elaborate gates at Westover plantation were made for William Byrd II in England. A “Set of Iron Palisades and Gates curiously wrought,” sold as part of a prize cargo in Norfolk in 1748, probably came from France. When the House of Burgesses in 1768 commissioned a statue of the beloved Governor Botetourt, the sculptor, Richard Hayward of London, was also to provide the iron railing that surrounded the base of the statue when it was set up in the portico of the Capitol. One reason for importing ironwork for these large jobs may have been that local smiths were not equipped to handle them; more likely, the importation was politically wise since manufacturing in the colonies was discouraged by the British government.

Ornamental ironwork is less characteristic of the colonial Virginia scene than of Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans. Nevertheless, there are some survivals, none finer than these two gates at Westover plantation on the James River.

The bills and accounts quoted a few pages back, and others, give ample evidence that most colonial smiths could read and write—although their spelling (like George Washington’s) might have a way of its own. At least one Williamsburg blacksmith, Hugh Orr, seems to have been quite a reader; at his death in 1764 he left a library of about forty books. But neither he nor any other colonial smith sat down to write out and illustrate a description of the work he did and how he did it.

This is not intended to be a how-to-do-it manual either. A few pages of text and pictures can hardly substitute for the apprenticeship of as much as seven years through which a blacksmith gained mastery of his craft. Only the close daily supervision of an expert and years of practice will enable a smith to know when the eye of his fire is large enough—but not too large ... when the forced draft of his bellows has made the fire hot enough—but not too hot ... when his iron is red enough—but not too red ... when his hammer blows fall heavily enough—but not too heavily to accomplish the particular job at hand.

Readers unfamiliar with the processes and products of a smithy are likely to be strangers also to many of the smith’s tools—which makes for something of a problem in trying to describe them. For this and other reasons it seems wise to start with what may be the most familiar items today.

Nails.In the early years of the Jamestown colony land was plentiful and nails were scarce. They, like every other object of iron—except the “little chissels” mentioned by Captain John Smith—had to be brought over from England. When the soil of their tobacco fields was worn out, planters simply took up, cleared, and planted new land farther west. Sometimes they set fire to buildings on the abandoned land in order to salvage the nails for re-use, a practice that was forbidden by law in 1644.

However, nails were not difficult to make if one had a supply of wrought-iron rods and a few tools. Frontier farmers—which in eighteenth-century Virginia meant those living one or twohundred miles to the west of Williamsburg—sometimes spent winter days in nailmaking. The fireplace served as forge, and even the younger members of the family could wield tongs, hammers, and cold chisel or man the vise.

Nails and tacks of various sizes and shapes and for various special uses, from Diderot’s encyclopedia. Figure 14 at the lower right is a wheel nail, for example.

Where there was a blacksmith, as we have already seen, he—or more likely his apprentice—made the nails. James Anderson estimated that eight boys could turn out twenty-five thousand nails in a week. Isaac Zane, who had an ironworks in the neighborhood of Winchester, owned “17 nailors tools great & small” and “2 nailors anvills.” The smith probably started with iron several feet long, about one-quarter-inch in width and the same thickness, produced in a slitting mill. His first procedure was todraw them down—and here we come to the first terminological stumbling block. Drawing down (or drawing out or beating out) is the smith’s phrase for thinning and lengthening a piece of metal by heating and hammering it. The contrary process of thickening—by hammering on the end of a rod—is called upsetting and is the technique used in making the head of the nail. Before he did that, though, the smith, having drawn down the rod to the proper thickness for the nails to be made, cut them to the desired length. Most likely he did this on a hardie, which is like a chisel held with the point upward in the square hardie hole of the anvil.

Horseshoes.Hugh Jones in 1724 wrote that horseshoes were “seldom used in the lower part of the country, where there are few stones.” It is true that the soil of tidewater Virginia tends to be sandy and free of stones, so that horses could and did go unshod much of the time. Yet there is ample evidence—some of which we have seen in the accounts excerpted above—that blacksmiths and farriers worked in the Williamsburg area at making and mounting horseshoes.

The forge of Master Delafosse, royal farrier, in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. From Diderot’s encyclopedia.

A smith who made, fitted, and applied shoes to horses, mules, and oxen was properly called a farrier. The trade demands knowledge and skill in handling iron, and also knowledge and skill in handling the animals being shod. Because of his close familiarity with these animals, his “horse sense,” so to speak, the farrier often served the function of veterinarian too. More often, however, it was the blacksmith who also served as farrier.

Horseshoes were made from bar iron, and they were normally custom made to fit not just a particular horse, but a particular one of his feet. Each shoe of a set of four will differ in one or more respects—size, shape, or weight—from its fellows, and each set may differ from others depending on the type of horse involved—draft, riding, carriage, etc.—and the condition of surface on which the shoes are to be used—ice, mud, stone, etc. In addition, special shoes can correct defects in gait, guard against lameness, and the like. To describe how a smith made all of these possible variations is no part of this booklet. Suffice it to say that in the making of a horseshoe all of the blacksmith’s basic tools come into use: forge, anvil, tongs, and vise. Some attention to each of these in turn will help to round out an understanding of the workings of the smithy.

Forge.The blacksmith’s forge, which he sometimes calls his fire, is the most important feature of his shop. It consists of a square hearth, usually raised about two and one-half feet and made of brick, with a bellows at the side or back to blow the fire, a hood or hovel above to carry smoke and fumes away, and a trough or tub of water close by in which to quench the iron or cool the tongs.

The fire itself, of coal rather than charcoal, is always small and concentrated, a few inches across in the center of a hearth that may be four or five feet square. Around it lies unburnt fuel that the smith can handily bring closer when needed. With his slice—a long-handled, light-weight shovel—his fire-hook—a similarly long-handled rake—and his washer—a bunch of twigs to flick water around the fire—he carefully manages the size and depth of the fire. With the bellows he regulates its intensity.

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