“Ka-clunk.” It’s a satisfying sound; there’s no denying it. I’m squinting up close to a lock set made recently but of a three-hundred-year-old design and using three-hundred-year-old tools and techniques. We’ve removed the box casing so we can see the inner workings, and I’m repeatedly throwing the deadbolt and turning the knob in fascination and study of it’s mechanism.
I’m in Pittsboro, North Carolina with my friends Eric and Wendell from Franklin County, and we’re visiting renowned blacksmith Peter Ross who was the Master Blacksmith at Colonial Williamsburg for twenty-two years before moving to the rolling hills of this part of North Carolina.
Peter moved not to retire from blacksmithing – far from it – but “for something different.” On this January morning we’re in his chilly shop, enthralled at all there is to see and touch. The focal point of this 18 x 18-foot space is the forge, and ancillary to it are the anvils of course! Piles of coke (as in coal) and long-handled tongs and hammers of all sorts. The floor is made of 4 x 4-inch cubes of tulip poplar, and, worn as they are, lend further to the rich and aromatic feel of the place.
Lock-sets are our first major distraction, the one I’m examining is prominent on the workbench. Its mechanism is complex, with many moving parts, and it works perfectly. Today we off-handedly consider technology of this vintage as “crude.” We assume that it was and is impossible, given the conditions and lack of modern stuff like electricity and internal combustion engines, to create items of great precision. But as I study the workings of this lock-set I realize that it works perfectly. Yes, it’s obvious that it is not “machine made,” but just right it fulfills the task for which it was designed.
Peter points out that with a well-placed whack of a chisel a craftsman can fine tune such a machine; enough steel can be coaxed to infinitesimally decrease or increase a dimension. Today we think of precision in terms of being able to replicate exactly a mechanism thousands of times over. In earlier days this was not necessary or relevant. What was required was that the individual creation did its job well, whether with simple elegance, or with a more ornate aesthetic.
Now, with a grin Eric points me in the direction of the far end of the bench, where an object sits that I cannot readily identify. “Hmmmm, let me think…no, I really couldn’t hazard a guess,” is my somewhat feeble comment. The thing is a machine about the size of a mailbox, with moving parts such as a crank handle and a drum around which is wound some hemp rope tied to a lead weight.
“Ah hah,” I conclude as I peruse some sketches on the bench. It’s a rotisserie control. It’s made to be mounted on the wall above and beside the cooking fireplace, and through a couple of gears the rotating drum’s force is transferred to a spit in the fireplace. With the hand crank one winds the rope around the drum and then the weight of the lead slowly unwinds the drum and the meat on the spit rotates and cooks, well, just right.
There’s a lot to look at here! Eric, an amateur blacksmith himself, shows me a corner of Peter’s shop overridden with hand-forged tools such as tongs, pliers, candle wick trimmers, and – my favorites – dividers. Dividers are instruments that look loosely like two chop sticks connected at a moveable joint at the thick ends, few of us use them these days, but craftsmen of old relied on them as a quick and easy way to transfer dimensions from one object to another.
The dividers made by Peter and his students are to me examples of the essence of the blacksmith’s art. Creating one involves, among other things, making a three-leaf compass joint. Don’t ask me to describe it, but if you can make such a joint then you’re well on your way to becoming an accomplished blacksmith. Of varying levels of finish, the dividers I turn in my hands and examine from every angle truly captivate me and Peter gets a kick out of my childlike behavior.
And then there are the hinges. The variety in the size and shape of these staples of the blacksmith’s art are practically endless. The gracefully-shaped “butterfly” hinges are my favorite, but the enduring utilitarian design of the big barn door variety holds for me a different but just as engaging kind of charm.
Over lunch at the local bar-b-que joint the four of us begin to talk about dairy farming and rural life in general The discussion soon turns to manual work and the pursuit of excellence, and about the threat of knowledge of arts like blacksmithing being lost amongst the distractions of modern life. And about principles that we – still – hold dear such as self-reliance and lifelong learning.
Thanks to folks like Peter Ross for keeping such a handsome craft as blacksmithing alive, and thanks to friends like Eric and Wendell who help keep you and me informed.
John W. Robinson
