TACOMA — 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 the Boeing Co., 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, 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.
A farm boy from North Dakota, Nelson at first thought he wanted to be a veterinarian. But then he decided he didn’t want to spend seemingly endless years in schools learning the profession. Farriers, he said, don’t just make horseshoes but also do some pathological work to keep horses and their hooves healthy. And training in that lasted only four months, he said.
One of his classmates was a man who had studied at Turley Forge, a renowned blacksmithing school in New Mexico.
From him, Nelson learned that there was more to blacksmithing than horseshoes. He learned it could be not just a trade, but an art form. He was hooked.
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.”
Certainly Shields fits that profile. He calls Nelson “one of the best instructors we’ve got” and said Nelson taught him how to make the forged and hammered decorative metal fish that Shields sells at the Proctor Farmers Market.
And Shields’ love of an older way of life is evident everywhere in his workshop. He prides himself on the fact that he uses no power equipment in his work. “A lot of guys will use a pneumatic hammer,” he said. Not him. “I do everything by hand.”
That includes making many of his own tools: chisels, tongs and punches. And Shields made his forge. Standing on sturdy metal legs about 5 feet above his garage floor, it’s a cylindrical steel object about the size of a large paint can mounted on firebrick and lined with a heat-resistant material called K-Wool that can withstand temperatures up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, Shields said.
In a nod to modernity, the forge is fueled by propane rather than the coal used by long-ago smiths. In a further nod to the modern age, Shields found the plans for the forge on the Internet. In it, he heats bars of steel and then hammers and shapes them into brackets for flowerpots and also brackets for birdhouses made by his wife, Rebecca, which the couple sell at the Proctor Farmers Market.
He makes larger items as well, including decorative iron gates. One hangs on an outside wall of his house. It’s rusty. That’s on purpose.
“I like the patina,” Shields said. “I just love the texture of it. Iron is always trying to go back to Mother Earth. It wants to rust and go back. It’s the most recycled stuff we’ve got. It really does give an earthy feeling to a guy that works in it.”
He knows that not everyone holds rust in such high esteem, so for most of his customers he coats his objects in heated paste wax to ward off moisture.
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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