"Blacksmithing began with the Iron Age, when primitive man first began making tools from iron. The Iron Age began when some primitive person noticed that a certain type of rock yielded iron when heated by the coals of a very hot campfire. In short, we can say that blacksmithing, the art of crafting that crude metal into a useable implement, has been around for a long, long time.

And for a long time after that, blacksmithing remained a crude art. It took three thousand years for man to learn the science of metallurgy. Long after man made the first simple tools, the first spear or arrow tips, the craft would require hundreds more years before blacksmiths understood the magnetic properties of iron. The first compass used a forged iron needle that floated in a round vial. This was a great discovery. By forging the needle as perfectly as he could, the blacksmith aligned the molecules in the iron and that is why north is north and south is south. From that point on, sailors could travel without need of stars nor sun to plot their courses around the globe.

As this whole iron industry evolved over time, blacksmithing became an umbrella for several specialties. The blacksmith who made suits of armor was an Armorer. The blacksmith who made knives and swords was a Bladesmith. The blacksmith who made locks was a Locksmith. The blacksmith who made gun barrels and triggers was a Gunsmith. The blacksmith who shod horses was a Farrier. Generally, the blacksmith we remember was a man who possessed all of these skills. Call him the "village smithy". The differentiation lies mainly in that his shop was not geared for making one particular type of product.

In colonial America, the village blacksmith was called upon to do many things. I have heard it said that some blacksmiths pulled teeth, no doubt meaning that a village without a dentist had to rely on the one man with a set of pliers! Let's just leave it at this. Making an axe or a knife or a fireplace crane or a set of door hinges or a handful of nails was what the village smithy did. His shop was the local hardware store. He could also repair a log chain or put rims on the wagon wheels or fix the axe that got chipped when it hit a rock. Whether the village needed swords or plowshares, the blacksmith made them. For without the blacksmith, the village could not survive.

Christopher Columbus and all the other European discoverers brought blacksmiths on their travels to the New World. Had they not done so, the trip could have been one way and possibly ended somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. From then on, every ounce of iron had to be transported here until a metal industry could be developed. And that took a century or two until the interior of North America was populated and ore deposits discovered.

We do need to appreciate the man who really built our modern world, the blacksmith. In peacetime and in wartime, the blacksmith was called on to do many tasks. Ben Franklin, in his Poor Richard's Almanac, wrote, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost...". In "The Village Blacksmith", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow praises the blacksmith: " His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man."