6 hours Ago
After learning about one of the oldest tool making methods — flint knapping — outside of Fort Watauga at Sycamore Shoals State Historic Site, I later traveled to the Exchange Place Fall Festival in Kingsport, where I moved along the tool making timeline to the age of fire and steel, blacksmithing. At the farm, I followed the sound of hammer hitting metal until I found David Pace from Hawkins County working at the Exchange Place forge along with Judah Halverson from Bristol and Abe Huish from Duffield. “I’m a chemist by training.
I work at Eastman Chemical — that’s my day job,” said Pace. “My son and I, we blacksmith. We blacksmith at home and here at Exchange Place as well.
We like to have the forge up and going at the festivals showing traditional crafts.” With a number of people stopping by and asking what kind of metal he was using, Pace told the story of how metal in blacksmithing changed over the years. “Traditionally, back when this farm was operating, they would have used wrought iron,” he said.
“Wrought iron is a process. It’s not actually like steel today. Mild steel is a material; wrought iron is a process.
After the pig iron is made in the furnace, there’s something called the bloom that is left over. The bloom is taken out, and it is beat, and that’s where the word wrought comes in. Wrought is an old English word for work.
“Oftentimes when people say ‘Oh, that’s a wrought iron fence.’ If it was made before 1920, it probably is a wrought iron fence. But if it was made after 1920, it’s not a wrought iron fence.
It’s a mild steel fence,” he said. “With the advent of the blast furnace, and it coming online about 1920 industrially, wrought iron became a thing of the past because it was so hard to make. "It was the only choice they had at that time, but with the advent of the blast furnace being able to make mild steel, they could crank that out in thousands of feet an hour.
It was impossible for wrought iron to keep up. So wrought iron went off the grid starting in 1920, and it’s not even made today. There might be one or two places that make wrought iron, but most wrought iron today is harvest from stuff out in the fields from old farm equipment and wagon wheels and stuff like that.
” "What does a person need to get into blacksmithing?" was another popular question asked during the festival. On the surface, the answers seem to imply it’s easy to be a blacksmith. But watching the blacksmiths in action, there is creativity and decision making that makes the difference between a blacksmith and someone beating metal with a hammer.
“There are three basic things you need to blacksmith,” said Pace. “You have to have a heat source — that’s our forge. You have to have something to hit the hot metal with — that’s the hammer.
Then you have something hard to hit the metal on — and that’s the anvil. So those are the three basic components for blacksmithing. From that point on it’s just your own artistic side in deciding what to make and how to make it.
” Pace moved on to the skill required. “There are only seven blacksmith skills really,” he said. “It’s easy to master each one of the seven.
The seventh one is probably the hardest one — that’s forge welding. That’s the most difficult one. But everything else — drawing out, upsetting, splitting or butchering (that’s the historical name, it’s called butchering metal, to cut it in half or split it) — it’s putting those seven skills together in different combinations kind of like an alphabet.
"There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and we can make millions of words by arranging those letters differently together. That’s the same thing you do with blacksmithing. You just arrange those seven skills differently to get a particularly desired outcome.
” Pace’s own beginning into blacksmithing involved his oldest son and snatching his wife’s hairdryer. “My oldest son, who is now 24, was in Scouts in Georgia at the time, and he was getting his merit badge in leather making,” he said. “I was watching him make something out of leather, and I thought ‘You know, I was in the Marine Corps and I have my KA-BAR, but the mice in my shop had eaten the leather up.
’ So I thought ‘I am going to make a leather sheath with him.’ So I started working, and he started teaching me how to work, and I was making a leather sheath. Then I got to thinking, ‘If I can make a leather sheath, why can’t I make the knife that goes in the sheath?' So that’s how I got started, and that was about 15 years ago.
” Pace’s first setup was simple. “I started on the ground with a ground forge. I just had three or four bricks and a big rock that I put over the top.
Then I got some lump charcoal from Walmart, and I stole my wife’s hairdryer out of the bathroom for an air source. She got a little upset, because she didn’t want it back after I had it outside like that. So, I had to drive Walmart that night and buy her another one which, from where we lived at the time, was 30 miles from our house.
So I had to take an hour trip to get her a new hairdryer. “But that’s how I got started right there on the ground. A guy gave me a piece of railroad iron, just a piece of railroad track steel, and that’s what I used as my anvil.
I had this ball-peen hammer in my tool box, and that’s how I got started.” Pace has moved on from his original setup. He now has three forges, a large number of hammers, tongs and everything else at his home.
His wife’s hairdryer remains untouched in the bathroom. Ned Jilton II is a photographer, history lover and columnist. You can contact him at ndjphoto@aol.
com ..
