The Smithy

On Saturday as G and j and I were walking home we came up on the blacksmith shop. It's over a 100 years old and we go past it every Sunday on the way to church. It's big brown wooden doors are usually closed. This is what we saw as we were walking home Saturday.
It was open for tours because it was out town's Heritage Days. Very cool. I love this old building. I'm pretty sure that the bricks that it's made from were made by my great-grandfather. I've walked past this building hundreds, possibly thousands of times in my life. When I was little it scared me, especially at night time. I would run past it as fast as I could and that was even if I was walking on the opposite side of the street. The big doors and dark windows were frightening. As time as passed I've grown to love and admire this place. They used to take school tours through but I don't know how much they do that any more. Thankfully they do open it once a year during the town festival.

This is a side door that is open. There is one just like it on the opposite side. The horses wagons would pull right up through the building. It has some neat things inside. It's not very tidy though. You can tell it's the domain of men, that and there hasn't been need for tidying up for a long, long time. I got some neat pictures of some of the things inside.

This first is a picture of an apron and a jacket and some paper that were hanging on the inside of one of the open doors.This next is a cabinet that was sitting on the work bench there. I think that it was to hold some type of thread or something because the second drawer up from the bottom says "Spool Cotton". The top drawer also says, to me, that this was in the domain of men. It's supposed to say Assorted Colors but certain letters have been rubbed off and I'm pretty sure it's not from "normal wear" because the next drawer down has every letter rubbed off but the last three and they are the same as the first three. That's not actually why I took the picture though. I just thought it was a cool cabinet. It wasn't until I got it home and opened it up on the computer that I noticed the subtleties in the spelling on the drawers.

G thought that this place was THE coolest place he'd seen in a very long time (can you imagine?) and begged and begged me to let him stay. The man that was there was very gracious and said that it would be fine for G to stay and help him out with another tour group that was coming through. He also fired up the forge and the bellows (which are all electric now) and heated up a branding iron and let G and some other kids that came in brand a piece of wood. The smell of the coal made me exceptionally sick to my stomach and light headed. I stayed around for a bit, enough to see this fine man let G help him use the mechanical hammer that they have there to hammer out really thick heavy items. G was in heaven.They also had some cool old bottles covered with dust and sitting on the shelf. The pictures I took of them did not turn out because I didn't want to use my flash. *sigh* Ah well. One of the coolest things in the place was this old scale. The full picture doesn't really give the feel of the age of this thing but the close-ups kind of do. These are my favorite shots from the smithy.