by John Demont
Once we all worked with our hands. We know that from our names—Baker, Barber, Brewer, Carpenter, Chandler (a maker of candles), Collier (coal miner), Cooper, Draper, Drover (someone who drivers cattle or sheep to market), Fisher, Farmer, Mason, Miller, Plumber, Porter, Roper, Sawyer (a carpenter or one who saws), Smith, Stone, Tanner, Taylor, Tucker (a cleaner of clothes), Wainwright (wagon maker) or Weaver. With time, gigantic clanking, hissing machines would replace solo men pounding hammers in small workshops. In his book The Craftsman Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship—which he describes as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”—isn’t disappearing. He thinks it has merely migrated. The Linux software operating system, for Sennett, is no less the work of a community of craftsmen than an ancient pot.
I fear we run in different circles. From where I sit there’s an obvious de-skilling going on in places like Canada. When technology and the modern-day consumer marketplace can do so much, who the hell needs to make a wall that lasts, to re-sole Dad’s hand-me-down brogues or to lift up the hood and see why the light in the dashboard stays on? To my mind, that’s a woeful development. Some things can’t be written down. Some skills—the understanding of the expert attained by a lifetime in proximity to his material, which is passed down from master to apprentice—disappear forever when the line is broken.
I pondered this last thought after reading a British study that pointed out that in some UK organizations, over 80 percent of manual workers exercised less skill in their jobs than they used driving to work. I’ve discovered no comparable figures about the de-skilling of Canada. But I do note that a century ago the province Pierre calls home had more carpenters (12,313 in all) than teachers, engineers, lawyers and accountants combined. In 1911, according to the Canadian census, Quebec had more stonemasons and cutters, plumbers and steamfitters than government bureaucrats. Overall, nearly half the Quebecers who held down jobs back then worked on farms. There were also more people working in the skilled building trades than in “commerce.”
Quebec, at that point in time, had barbers and bootblacks (2,328), sextons (636), explosives makers (348), button makers (39), furriers (1,148) and white-wear makers (901). It had platers and polishers (138), printers and engravers (3,941), tanners and curriers (1,306), sail makers and riggers (15), along with telephone and telegraph linemen (987). It had people who made and repaired watches, clocks and jewellery (199), scales (38), boots and shoes (9,133), trunks (218) and musical instruments (373). Its citizens constructed fruit baskets and boxes (504), picture frames and showcases (62), brooms and brushes (293), bags and sacks (80), metal shelves (51) and surgical instruments (5). The great expansion of Quebec’s heavy industries may have been just getting underway, but skilled workers were busy building locomotives (1,618) and toiling as machinists (5,205), iron founders (2,177) and metalworkers (1,060).
According to the 1911 census, a total of 4,812 Quebecers plied the trade of forgeron, or blacksmith. It’s a lineage that goes back to prehistoric times when some short, shambling humanoid discovered that heating and smiting iron could turn it into something else. Smiths forged the weapons of conquest and the tools of civilization. As the great Christian cathedrals rose up through what would become Europe, smiths made hinges, gates and doorknockers, fences for cemeteries and clasps for vestments. In Asia they made plows for the poor. In colonial North America, where they made flintlocks and forged cooking utensils and tools, they touched every aspect of life.
In the early seventeenth century, King Louis XIV decreed that French artisans who had practised their trade overseas for more than six years would be allowed to set up shop as master craftsmen in Paris or any other city in the kingdom once they returned to the mother country. By so doing, Louis hoped to encourage his country’s superlative craftsmen to immigrate to New France. What they did in this far-off colony, according to historian Robert Tremblay, depended upon where they set up shop: in Quebec seigneuries they fabricated hand tools and farm implements; in fortified cities and remote trading posts smiths spent more time making rifles, fusils and pieces of artillery. The ones who ended up in fishing villages made hooks, anchors and ironwork for boats.
In time, horseshoeing came to occupy of blacksmiths’ hours as horses arrived for transportation and manual labour. Out of necessity, many blacksmiths eventually diversified. As well as shoeing horses, they made tools, nails and wheels. Occasionally they made a cart or carriage. Most of their time was spent making household items and the other objects of everyday life. They were, according to every chronicler of the time, more important than the village doctor.
WHEN Pierre pounds metal, he leans forward at the waist. He grips the hammer halfway down the shaft. He hits the metal like a boxer throwing a short left hand or an angler trying to place a fly on the end of monofilament line in the middle of some moving water: with economic force—restraint rather than abandon. “The myth of the big muscular blacksmith is just a myth,” he explains. “Most of us are small guys. Because it is not strength—it is technique. You don’t muscle the iron. You try to be smart and let the fire do the work for you.”
Wrought iron has a grain that resembles wood fibre. That appeals to the woodworker in Pierre. You have to watch the iron react,” he says. “You have to learn how to read the metal. You have to know what kind of a blow is necessary to upset the metal (really, really hard) or draw out the metal (heavy, straight down and square). You have to know how to grip the hammer: usually a couple of inches from the bottom with the thumb wrapped around the shaft, rather than over the top, which causes tennis elbow. And you have to know how to swing the hammer: mostly a flick of the wrist for light blows, but employing the shoulder and elbow for everything else.
Pierre adds, “Some people think you have to beat the hell out of it. Well, yeah and no. I prefer to use less force and go more slowly to making it a finished piece. When whacking the hell out of something, you lose some precision. If you go too hard, you will go past the point where you want it to be. Then there’s not too much you can do about it.”
It’s work. Sometimes Pierre pounds a piece of metal hundreds of times before he’s done. That’s why ensuring the iron is hot enough is so important. Hitting a piece of cold metal with a hammer is about as useful and pleasant as walloping a steel girder with an aluminum baseball bat. By letting the heat do the work, Pierre gets a better result. He also gobbles fewer Tylenol. Even a 3.5-pound hammer gets heavy if you swing it a few hundred times. Sometimes a blacksmith needs a second to figure out what to do next. Pierre uses a little trick to get around both problems: he gently taps the anvil between blows. That gives him a little breathing space without losing kinetic energy for the hammering process.
Pierre works on the sugar shack lock with a rhythm as regular as a metronome’s: one, two, three, tap the anvil. One, two, three, tap the anvil. He didn’t create that cadence. He inherited it. Pierre stops to wipe his brow. It is after eleven and warm. He’s wearing tan, canvas bib overalls, a blue work shirt over a blue T-shirt, and brown workboots.
By the middle of the twentieth century, each Canadian rural village had three to five blacksmiths, or about one per hundred families. “Each smith had their own specialty,” he says. “Some were more farriers who shoed horses. Others made sleds and did other things.” The Sainte-Justine area, it turned out, had a good smith—Elias Seguin, a general blacksmith and wheelwright (a maker and repairer of wheels) who worked in nearby Sainte-Marthe during the early part of the twentieth century.
Picture a solid building with an ever-present plume of smoke exiting the chimney to his shop. Nearby, according to the research I consulted about how Seguin’s operation likely looked, would be a small corral where customers could leave their horses while they waited for the animals to be shod. The entrance to the shop is wide enough to allow a horse, sometimes even a wagon, to pass through. The rear of the shop is gloomily lit, allowing Seguin to gauge the heat of the metal he is working. There’d be people,
Quebec historian Jean-Claude Dupont concludes:
The village smithy was always brimming with activity. It was a meeting place where men held their stag parties, learned to drink, played power and parlour games and discussed politics. The blacksmith indulged in certain popular practices: he was called to re-establish order in the village; he struck the new fire of Holy Saturday in his forge and carried it into the church; he headed the labour group and maintained the fire used in flax crushing; his horses drew the hearse.
In rural Quebec in the early twentieth century, Dupont says, blacksmiths practised a “magico-religious medicine based on vaguely scientific notions, combined with folk beliefs and superstitions.” They also acted as a sort of banker: lending money at interest and reselling grains, vegetables, meats and other produce that they received in payment for their services.
On a good day, a hard-working blacksmith like Seguin had time to shoe fifteen horses. But even in the early twentieth century he would have understood that his day was already passing. The automobile was the problem. When it arrived, many Canadian smiths headed west, where competition wasn’t as fierce and, eventually, into the First World War munitions factories. Many of Quebec’s country smiths transformed their old smithies into workshops for repairing automobiles and farm equipment. That didn’t stop the trade’s slow demise.
Pierre didn’t give ironwork a second’s thought when he was growing up in Rigaud. Or when he and a car full of cousins made for the big city. In Montreal he studied woodworking in a technical school—where he first discovered his affinity for old artisanal tools and techniques—and started working as a stained glass artist. Pierre was twenty-four and employed in a Montreal gardening store when he and Marie-Josée came to their senses and moved back home onto land sold to them by Pierre’s papa. During the three-hour daily commutes he had lots of time to think about what he wanted to do with his life. At night at home he found himself going into the barn to look at the historic leaf forge he had inherited along with the property.
Sometime along the way—he’s not sure precisely when—he got the urge to try to forge a piece of metal into something useful. There was no one around to show him the proper techniques, so he took out books from the Montreal Public Library. He went on the Internet. He scraped together some cash and went to demonstrations in Ontario and Quebec. Soon Pierre seemed to have two jobs: at the gardening store during the day, then at home at night and on the weekends, learning his craft. “There’s a saying, ‘C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron,’ he explains. “It means being a smithy is how you become a blacksmith. That is how you learn. A book is good in theory. But there’s nothing like doing it with a hammer and anvil.”
Before long, he was selling his reproductions of eighteenth-century grilling forks, French potholders and double-turn locks on the Internet. Rich guys would hire Pierre to make cooking utensils for the hearths in their historic summer places. Railways came searching for ironwork. So did furniture makers—wanting locks for their cabinets and wrought-iron backs for their benches—and sculptors (one hired him to make a scale model of the Eiffel Tower). Historic re-enactors—accountants, car mechanics and ad executives looking to re-create the Battle of the Plains of Abraham right down to the scratchy wool underwear—contacted Pierre to make authentic pots, pans and tripods for cooking their food while “in the field.”
Some people who do iron reproductions spend a lot of time with grinders and other tools, making them look as if they were made a couple of centuries ago. Pierre doesn’t just make things that look old. He uses the same antique tools, mostly forged by his own hand. He uses techniques that, in essence, haven’t changed from two centuries ago in rural Quebec. When he forges a rushlight—sort of a candle holder designed to hold a reed dipped in fat—by hand, using old tools and without an electric weld, it isn’t just a reproduction of an eighteenth-century lighting device. It is an eighteenth-century lighting device.
When he heats a piece of wrought iron and hammers it into the precise shape of a nineteenth-century bootjack, you can almost see some seigneur, home from a day of abusing the peasantry, flopping down in a chair and, with a sneering expression, waiting for a servant to pull off his boots. Nothing makes Pierre prouder than when someone casts an eye over a piece of his and declares that it could have been made a century ago. “I don’t just want it to look nice,” he says, in many ways, over and over again in our conversations. “I want it to be right.”
Once the metal for the sugar shack lock is the right thickness, he takes a prong-like metal tool called a “bending fork” and inserts it into the anvil’s square “hardie hole.” He lays the metal across one of the tines and starts to tap it with a small hammer until it starts to curve. When he’s happy with the shape, Pierre writes a backward P and a backward B—his distinctive “touch mark.” He rubs a wire brush along the lock to get rid of the flaws and to smooth and shine the surface. Then he takes a small yellow cake and starts rubbing it along the still-warm metal. If the metal is too hot, the beeswax will burst into flame. Otherwise, it smokes and carbonizes until it forms a black coating. Pierre walks out into the sunlight. He waves the iron in the air with the reverence of a Cree shaman performing the sweetgrass ceremony.
PIERRE doesn’t need a lot of money, he tells me. “I’m not a greedy guy. If I have enough to pay the bills, then I’m happy. I could do more monkey jobs, making twenty pieces all the same, and sometimes I have to do that. But once I have enough money to live for a month, I do the stuff I want to do. It is the kick of making something unique. I want to be proud of what I’ve done. I would rather please myself than please the customer. Real blacksmiths are not forging for our customers. We are forging for other blacksmiths.”
Inside his house the self-taught chef drops pasta into the boiling water and turns up the heat under the homemade tomato sauce. He breaks the hard Quebec cheese into hunks and serves up bread, still warm from the bread maker. The meal is comfort in a bowl. I shouldn’t be surprised. Pierre has an unusual bag of hobbies—cooking, playing the sitar, crafting the kind of handmade wooden toys with moving parts popular at the start of the twentieth century—and seems competent at all of them. I ask him how long it takes to become a good blacksmith. He ponders that for a second before saying that the answer depends on the style and complexity of the work. Then he adds, “Being a blacksmith is like cooking. Once you really know the recipe—once you understand every ingredient, why it’s there and how it must be treated—then you can throw it away and go by taste.”
Pierre isn’t measuring himself against the stuff you see at the local store. He has a higher standard: his Quebec predecessors, the purveyors of his favourite artistic styles, Italian art nouveau and early-American Pennsylvania Dutch. Mostly he wants to earn the esteem of his mentor, Lloyd Johnston, whose people have been blacksmithing in the Kawartha Lakes area of Ontario since 1831. At seventeen Lloyd told his father that he was never going to work where he got his hands dirty. Nonetheless, he studied engineering at university, graduated and then went looking for something to do with his hands “for a while.” Now he and Pierre talk once a week on the phone, and meet at old-time craft festivals. Every month or so Pierre hops in his pickup and makes the six-hour drive to Woodville, Ontario, where Lloyd, one of the province’s thirty-or-so professional blacksmiths lives and operates his blacksmithing school.
Guys like this have to stick together. Blacksmithing is a lonely business and Pierre a social guy. This afternoon he is forging a long-handled frying pan for some history buffs looking to re-create the days of the coureurs de bois. Some jobs require more than two hands. Fortunately, today he has help. A man about Pierre’s age has shown up. His face is angular; his eyes are dark and Gallic, the bequests of ancestors who made the long Atlantic crossing from France. He is marginally taller than Pierre is, lanky, with a ponytail and a dark beard. He wears a loose-fitting denim shirt, work pants and boots. He carries a plastic forty-ounce bottle of Coke.
Though Dominique Marleau
lives in Montreal, he was born in Rigaud, the same as Pierre. One day in 2006 he was wandering around at a traditional arts festival in a town called Vaudreuil, when he discovered Pierre putting on a blacksmithing demonstration. “I said, ‘Wow, that is neat,’ ” explains Dominique. “I’m a train conductor by day so I like things made of iron. But I also like the fire and doing things the old way. I like being able to re-create the way something was made three hundred years ago.”
Blacksmiths used to have full-time assistants who operated the bellows, stirred the fire and carried the coals. Pierre would dearly love to have an apprentice to whom he could pass on the time-honoured techniques. In time, maybe Dominique will live up to his promise to move home and really get serious about learning the craft. For now the best he can do is a once-a-week jaunt to Sainte-Justine-de-Newton to absorb what Pierre can show him.
By the time Dominique arrives Pierre has already prepared the forge—cleaning the fire pot, lighting the newspaper, piling the coal atop the coke, adding some kindling, turning on the air. The customer for the long-handled frying pan isn’t paying enough to forge the whole thing from scratch. So Pierre takes an old frying pan and cuts the handle off with a grinder. To connect the pan to the handle, he needs a short, T-shaped chunk of metal. Pierre marks one end of the metal with a piece of chalk and then shoves it into the coals. When the metal is yellow-hot, he lifts it onto the anvil and hits it with the hammer, sending flecks of scale that formed on the hot iron flying into the air seemingly at the speed of sound. “Blacksmiths get burned a lot,” he says. “If something falls, the natural reflex is to catch it. I used to try and pluck those chips. You have to lose the reflex of catching them.”
