The air thick with smoke and the scent of burning coals, the almost oppressive heat of the forge’s fire warming your face, the incessant ringing of hammer on anvil — these are the sensations you’d experience upon entering a blacksmith’s shop many years ago.
One of the most important members in any 19th century community was the blacksmith. His trade represented a vital component of the rural way of life. The items shaped from white-hot metal weren’t merely tools: they were a settler’s very lifeblood, his means of survival.
Yet today, less than six decades after the final blacksmiths in Dufferin County finally let their forges go cold and closed their shops, the role of the blacksmith is largely forgotten. What knowledge remains is based heavily on myth and caricature, the brawny, dim-witted fellow who made a living solely from shoeing horses.
The reality is far more interesting. Let’s pull open the doors of the smithy, peer through the smoke, and explore the true nature of the village blacksmith.
In the earliest years of settlement, there were no dedicated smiths. Instead, farmers would often have their own forges to repair equipment and shoe horses as best they could. But as communities grew in size and sophistication, specialists were needed to fill this invaluable role. Dedicated blacksmiths emerged in every village across Ontario.
In fact, blacksmiths were among the first craftspeople to appear in any early Ontario community. Without their services our society could never have developed. The village of Melancton, for example, had a smithy run by George Young even before it had a general store, post office, school or church — a sure indication of the importance of these businesses to area development.
It’s easy to equate blacksmiths with horse shoeing and nothing more. But that would provide an incomplete picture of their value to the community. In addition to forging horse shoes, they repaired farm equipment such as plough and furrows, crafted a wide variety of tools and farm implements, and made household items such as pots and hinges. If the machinery at the local mill needed repair, the blacksmith was the one to call. In short, if the product was metal, a blacksmith was expected to be able to make and repair it.
Most blacksmiths, in addition to shoeing horses and crafting metal tools and household utensils, also served as wheelwrights and made repairs to wagons. It only makes sense: wear and tear on wagons and buggies bouncing along the rough roads of 19th century Dufferin County would ensure a steady stream of customers from among the farmers, coachmen and drovers who passed through, each one eager to have a wheel hurriedly repaired.
As a consequence one would have found an unusual concentration of smiths in villages through which passed busy thoroughfares, such as the Newmarket-Orangeville road (Highway 9) or the Gilford-Cookstown-Alliston-Shelburne road (Highway 89). For example, the Simcoe County Directory for 1872 lists three blacksmiths in the hamlet of Rosemont, too many to service the needs of such a small community. Clearly, they were sustained by the traffic streaming through town.
Far from the stereotype, most blacksmiths were intelligent, perhaps not well schooled, but bright and skilled. They were often the most mechanically inclined individuals in town, and many operated businesses besides their smithy. John Brown of Rosemont, for example, was both village blacksmith and prosperous storekeeper. In Sheldon, Herb Penelton ran a planing mill in addition to working the forge.
Generally, a smith would take on an apprentice to assist him. The young boy’s most important task was to feed the fire and work the arm of the bellows, fanning the flames to the desired temperature. The smith, meanwhile, would hold glowing metal in the burning embers with a set of tongs. When the iron had turned white and become malleable, he would pull it out of the flames and then hammer and shape the the metal on his anvil.
By the early years of the 20th century, such sights were becoming increasing rare as blacksmiths were on the verge of obsolescence. Cars succeeded horses on the roadways of Dufferin, farming was becoming increasingly mechanized and factory-made products were quickly replacing those made by village craftsmen.
But the transition from horse to machine on the farm and even along the rural roads was a gradual one, and the need for a blacksmith’s services remained well into the 20th century.
Mrs. B. Moffat, reminiscing in a 1952 letter to the Orangeville Banner about her youth, noted that even as late as 1925 there were at least five blacksmiths in town. She had vivid and fond memories of them:
“It is not so long ago on Broadway two blacksmith shops stood almost side by side. We used to stand at the door while Bob Ferns would pump the bellows, and make the fire burn up and heat a horseshoe on a pair of long tongs, and then take it out and quickly plunge it into a tub of water sitting on the floor, while the steam hissed. Then while we stood there watching, he would take up the horse’s foot, lift it up and hammer on the shoe.”
Time marches on, however, eventually trampling Dufferin’s blacksmith shops underfoot with the full onslaught of the automobile era. Blacksmiths became victims of changing times. Today, their forges long-since extinguished, all traces of the various smithy’s are gone. But neither the passage of years nor the evolution of technology can erase the contribution blacksmiths made to the development of Dufferin County.