Forging Wrought Iron For 30 Years

My name, full name, James Quint Tyree III, Jamie, blacksmith for 30 plus years now here in Limestone, Tennessee, born and raised. Most of my work, production work, is door hardware, strap hinges, panels, thumb latches, kick plates, but also hearth cooking equipment. That's my, what I prefer to do, restoration work or replication work more than anything else, copying the old work, existing pieces. I started, I guess, roughly when I was 12. My grandfather was raised in a blacksmith shop, and he was a machinist by trade, machinist slash mechanic. He knew what tools were used in a forge shop and all that, so when I expressed an interest, probably around the age of nine, he started finding tools, and there were still some old blacksmiths here at that time that were able to sort of coach me along and tell me how to build a wooden forge. Gave me my first anvil and hammer. That was around the age of 12, I guess. Grabbing every book I could find, taught myself up until I went into tech school, two years of technical school as a machinist, right out of high school, and as quick as I got done with that, I got accepted into apprenticeship under Elmer Rausch, Czechoslovakian trainsmith, and then I was with him for six months until my grandfather got sick, come home, take care of him. Once he passed, then I went as an apprentice under Russell Oldale, who was a German trainsmith, and was with him for two years, and then went out on my own. My particular niche, of course, is early American, primarily late 1700s. Anything that would have been in a household at that time, be it strap hinges or cooking utensils, toddy warmers, whatever it may be, we do all of it, and as much as we can, we try to do it out of the original material. That's my niche market, is I try to do as much as possible out of wrought iron, as opposed to modern mild steel, which unfortunately wrought iron is not produced anymore, so we have to salvage where we can find it, which in a way is a good thing, because we cannot get it in dimensional sizes. It's generally in big stock, which means we have to reduce it down to the work of material that we need, and that's exactly the way it was done, and you know, in 1780, you know, you didn't buy dimensional sizes, you bought large sizes, and a great amount of effort was put in to bringing it down to the size of material you needed just to start the project, which makes it look the way it looks. Quite often we do get original pieces into the shop that we need to duplicate. When the customer architect, whoever, hands that piece to me, it's almost like you can feel the creator, the smith, speaking through that material, and it's a connection from one smith to another, because we instantly recognize how some of the processes, how they were used to create this piece, or we can look at marks on it and instantly recognize what tool would have been used, so you first off have an admiration for the man that made that piece. You know that maybe in some ways you're at least an equal to the real black smiths, and then having to dissect the part, the piece, to determine how every little single part was made in order to replicate that, and that's when you really start to see, in some cases, the ingenuity of the original smith, and sometimes it's not quite so easy to see, because you will sit and say, oh, he did it this way, but why did he do it that way? Oh gosh, why would he do it that way? It looks like an awful hard way of doing it, until you see another piece and it's done the same way, and you say, hey, wait a minute, no, that was a common technique at that time. You know, we have learned something different, or I have learned something different to do it another way. This is actually easier to do it the way he done it, using the material they were using and what they had available, and a lot of times, you know, they were just as lazy then as we are now. They figured out the quickest and easiest way to do something efficiently to save their arms and stuff. That's the fun, is figuring out how they did that to try to protect their body so they could work longer, and how can that be used, for me, the modern smith, to protect my body. In some cases, how they did not neatly finish a piece, because it was going to be hidden, and they recognized that. Stuff like that, seeing what tools they had, and how they used them, why they used them, where they used them, and how much they used them. And then, once you figure out how they've done the piece and all that, and you make your piece, and then compare it to the original, you know, and you say, well, I'm not up to snuff with that smith yet, or, looky there, I created what he has created. You know, at least in some sense, some small sense, I'm maybe equal to this heavenly person that forged this. And just the simple joy of handling an ancient piece, you know, and knowing all the hands, trying to figure out the story of all the people that had touched that piece, or, you know, like a thumb latch, perhaps, on a door, you know, how many vicars or presidents or British soldiers or whatever touched this to come into this house, or how many people were happily married, touching it for the first time, or something like that. That's the fun part, too, is the imagination of what all peoples touched that, and what their emotions were, and what surrounded them coming in that door. Making the piece, and when I hand it to the customer, it's not about me, or it's not about that customer. It's about those generations down the road that maybe a scholar or another smith or something picks up that piece and says, wonder who made this? Wonder what his conditions were? When he filed this, he lovingly took the time to file the back. That will never be seen, really. Why did he do that? What was he trying to communicate to me, you know, in the future? And I very much do that in my work. You know, I do these pieces, it's not for gratification of myself at all. It's for that person, way in the future, that picks that up, that he might be able to try to communicate through those techniques. You know, he recognizes it and says, well now, why did he do this? And I'm trying to communicate to him why I did that. I did this for you. That's why I did that. I'm trying to preserve some little piece that I have learned from the past, so that you may learn from that, too. And I think that very much was taking place in the old work. And this may sound a bit silly, but any blacksmith, I think, that's forged throughout would agree with me. You feel almost like you're a superpower because you're taking this very rigid material and making it move to your will. You're making it bend to your will. And it's not an ego thing at all. It's amazement just how far humans have come and how wonderful it is that this is being discovered. You know, when I'm forging it and it is doing exactly what I want it to do, still to this day, you know, 30 plus years in, I get giddy inside. You know, this is moving beautifully. How fortunate am I to have this ability and be able to make something that otherwise would not move do exactly what I want it to do. And while you're forging, you can see the grain in the material. You can see it bend and move and snake around, and you're controlling its every movement, you know. And it's just almost a magical sort of feeling, really.