Harold B. Gill

“ Welding two pieces of iron is at the same time very simple in theory and very difficult in fact. At the proper heat the two pieces placed firmly face to face will—if the faces are clean—stick together without further ado. But accomplishing this feat requires great skill with the fire and great quickness with the hammer so that scale will not form on the surfaces to be welded. Normally the weld is hammered together on the anvil to refine the grain of the metal as it cools.
Another farrier’s shop, no doubt drawn on the spot with tools and equipment just as they were seen by the artist. ”

“ 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 as 13 one of several “great helps and advances made towards the beginning of a town.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 two 19 hundred 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. ”

“ Blood-red heat is called for when the iron is not to be reshaped but only the surface to be smoothed. Flame heat or white heat is necessary when the work is to be hammered to a different shape, drawn down, or upset. Sparkling heat or welding heat is used only for the delicate and highly skilled process of welding.
Anvil. This is hardly less important to the smith than the forge, as he does practically all of his work on it. The common smith’s anvil, made of cast or wrought iron, may weigh up to about three hundred pounds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
SEEKERS FOR GOLD AND IRON
Down through all recorded civilizations man has valued gold as the most precious of metals. Yet in every civilization since 2 man learned to smelt and forge it, iron has in fact been the metal most valuable to him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tongs. Iron being a metal that transmits heat readily, the blacksmith often cannot hold the piece he is working on, even with a gloved hand. He needs tongs to do the holding, and because of the differing shape of different objects being worked, he needs a variety of tongs of different shapes and sizes. These 23 he ordinarily makes himself. John Brush of Williamsburg, for instance, owned “7 pair of Smiths Tongs.”
Hammers. It has already been said that the smith’s forge and anvil are among his essential tools. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cover the iron all over with a cement made of powdered cow horn or hoof, coarse sea salt, stale urine or white wine vinegar, and clay, with more clay added to enclose the whole; when the clay has dried hard, put the whole lump in the fire and bring it to blood-red heat, no more ”

“ 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 careful 3 instructions, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From Diderot.
26 THE ESSENTIAL CRAFT
James Anderson was described earlier in these pages as Williamsburg’s foremost blacksmith during the years when his shop occupied a lot on Francis Street. Several of his ledger books are still in existence, some of them treasured possessions of Colonial Williamsburg. Among endless entries covering the laying of axes, hoes, plows, and colters, appear others that show the less routine aspects of Anderson’s daily work: mending a poker; making a nut for a bolt of a chair (probably a riding chair) ; dressing two mill picks; mending a lock ”

“ 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. ”