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THE BLACKSMITH in Eighteenth-Century _WILLIAMSBURG_

An Account of his Life & Times and of his Craft

_Williamsburg Craft Series_

_WILLIAMSBURG_ Published by _Colonial Williamsburg_ MCMLXXVIII

_The Blacksmith in Eighteenth-Century_ Williamsburg

"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.

_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 man 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.

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 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.

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.

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 the _Mayflower_ left 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 of _Iron_ made 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.

_EARLY IRONMASTERS_

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.) The Saugus 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.

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 them profitable, 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.

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.

_THE COUNTRY BLACKSMITH_

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."

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, entitled _The 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 point of 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 the _Virginia Gazette_:

Just arrived the _Success's Increase_, Captain _Curtis_, 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 at _Leeds_ Town, on Monday the 3d of _January_ and 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. The following bill of John Cock indicates the kinds of work done by rural Virginia blacksmiths and the prices they charged in 1759:

To making Niles and Shuing one whele 0 12 6 To making a hoop one Staple and two Rings and 0 5 6 Rivating the wheles by J. L. 1759 January 4 To Shuing a pr of five foot and a half wheles and 3 0 0 Rivating them Round A. L. 9 To making 5 Staples 1 Ring and 3 goosnecks 0 9 0 12 To making 5 Staples for the yokes & bees 0 4 0 To making 3 hooks and 6 Rings 0 5 0 To making 1 large Ring 0 1 0 To making 8 small pins & Cuting a Chane and 0 3 6 making a traces 20 To making 4 hooks and 4 Rings 0 4 0 To making an ox chane 0 7 6 To Lanthing an ox Chane and making a Staple and 0 2 0 Ring To making a ploug Large 0 6 0 To making an ax 0 2 0 F.1 To making three axes one of my iron 0 6 6 12 To Cuting a plough hoe 0 3 9 21 To Laying Eight hilling hoes 0 12 0 24 To Laying a fluck hoe of my iron 0 4 6 To making a plough of my iron 0 10 0 To making 3 hilling hoes 0 4 6 To making 5 hilling hoes 0 7 6 £8 10 9

_THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH_

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 one 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.