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| 2/18/2009 1:56:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article
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Blacksmith Darryl Nelson works on a bear head at his "Fire Mountain Forge" in Eatonville, Wash. Nelson, 55, is one of the founders and a past president of the Northwest Blacksmith Association, a trade organization that takes in Washington, northern Oregon, western Idaho and Vancouver, B.C. It has more than 600 members.
Janet Jensen. The News Tribune |
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Blacksmith Darryl Nelson holds a freshly completed and still red-hot bear head he created at his "Fire Mountain Forge".
Janet Jensen. The News Tribune |
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Modern day blacksmith
By SOREN ANDERSEN -The News Tribune
TACOMA, Wash. - It's a sound that's echoed through the centuries since antiquity. It's the sound Vulcan made at his forge under Mount Etna. It's the sound memorialized in Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith." It's the clang of a hammer striking red-hot metal laid upon an anvil.
You hear that sound as you walk up the driveway of John Shields' home in University Place. Within sight of the Day Island Bridge, the 61-year-old Shields, a tool and die designer for Boeing, carries on an ancient tradition that he said gave rise to his modern occupation.
Standing at his anvil, a 100-year-old antique, beside a homemade forge roaring in his garage workshop, Shields said: "This is going back to the grass roots. That's what really turns me on about it, because it takes you right back to the beginning, to the mother of the trade."
He made his first forged object, a fireplace poker, in metal shop as a student at Mason Junior High School in Tacoma.
Blacksmiths, Shields said, "were actually the first generation of machinists and tool and die makers. Anything in iron, they manufactured."
He caught the blacksmithing bug at an early age. He caught it from his father, Beverly Gordon Shields. "He was a journeyman tool and die maker and a blacksmith, too, and when I was a little kid I was drug around to every machine shop here in Tacoma that he knew."
His late father's photo hangs on the wall of his workshop, and his toolbox rests upon a shelf there. The feeling that a legacy is being honored is strong.
Working at the forge "gives you a sense of a link to your ancestors," Shields said. "I'm Irish. My dad was Irish. We're Celts, and they were great ironworkers."
And as his father's legacy was passed down to him, Shields is passing it on to the next generation. His daughter, Adawnya Shields, a pipefitter by trade, has been learning the blacksmith craft from him as an apprentice for about four years.
Blacksmithing went into a long decline beginning in the mid-19th century as factories produced more and more items traditionally made by smiths. The decline accelerated in the early 20th century as automobiles made the horse and buggy obsolete.
With the demand for iron wagon-wheel rims and horseshoes drying up, the craft withered. But it never entirely died out. And in the early 1970s it began to revive, said Darryl Nelson of Eatonville.
Nelson, 55, is one of the founders and a past president of the Northwest Blacksmith Association, a trade organization that takes in Washington, northern Oregon, western Idaho and Vancouver, B.C. It has more than 600 members, Nelson said. Most are hobbyists, like Shields, pursuing the craft in their spare time.
Around 60 are full-timers, Nelson said. He's one of them, and has been for 35 years.
Nelson got his start in blacksmithing at age 19 when he enrolled in the farrier program at an Olympia trade school. A farrier is someone who makes and fits horseshoes.
Today, at Fire Mountain Forge, his blacksmith shop in Eatonville, he makes a living making fireplace implements, andirons and pokers, and railings and chandeliers. The fireplace tools are adorned with hand-forged animal heads. Nelson said he's made thousands.
"Mountain goat heads, bear heads, ram's heads, bison heads, deer, elk, lynx, cougar, wolves, dogs." Even warthogs. "There aren't many animals at this point I haven't forged," he said.
He's sold many of these items to lodges, with Timberline Lodge in Oregon and Skamania Lodge in Washington being among his biggest customers. When lodge guests saw his work and began placing private orders, his business really took off.
"It's not just a job, it's a love," he said of the attractions of modern-day blacksmithing.
"At the end of the day, you see what you've spent your day doing. It's not a pile of papers in the corner of a desk. It's actually something that has significant weight to it and a use."
Since the '70s Nelson has taught classes in the craft of blacksmithing. In the last five years, he's taught them at a school he runs on his Eatonville property called Meridian Forge. Students have ranged in age from 12 to 80 years old, he said, and the numbers of people who sign up for his three-day classes have been growing over the years.
The appeal, he said, is in what he calls "the honesty of the labor."
"You have to be active," Nelson said, "and I think that's very attractive to a lot of these young people. This virtual stuff on the computer, that's not really interactive."
True interactivity, he said, comes from seeing that the force of a series of hammer blows "can create something of utilitarian or artistic value."
Nelson said the people who come to him to learn blacksmithing are a lot like him: "We're all very independent. And we all have a love of an older way of life."
When he talks about the appeal of modern-day blacksmithing, Shields waxed lyrical: Shaping steel by hand, he said, gives him the feeling of "making something that feels almost alive. You pick up a hand-forged item, and it's got character. It's got personality."
"For me, it's just so self-satisfying to pound something out with a hand hammer on an anvil that is going to outlast me by centuries," he said.
He said he discovered at an early age that he has an almost intuitive sense of how to shape red-hot metal.
"You've got to read the metal. You've got to feel the metal. You've got to watch it flow, and once you start seeing how it flows, each hammer stroke becomes efficient, and every time you hit that piece of metal it goes in the direction you want it to go."
And blacksmithing is a great stress reliever.
"Oh, it's great after being on the freeway," he said. The feeling of a hammer rebounding off hot steel is elemental. It's soothing, Shields said. "You can't beat it."
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Reader Comments
Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Article comment by:
Iron railings Coquitlam
Wow nice artistic metal.
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