Almost every smith will say that from time to time a visitor will announce, “My grandfather was a blacksmith.” Eventually, that event will become less common. Blacksmith numbers are not what they were a century ago.
One of the friends, Scott Miller, who often helps me can confidently claim his grandfather, Jim Lewis, was a blacksmith. He has the proof of it. A history of his hometown, Lebo, Kansas, contains a photograph of the grandfather and great-grandfather standing by the door where they burned the cattle brands of their rancher clients. The old building stood from the 1880’s until 1951 when it was replaced by a Quonset hut, which became widely available for civilian use after WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
Scott has a good eye for design, a devotion to technical competence and the strength to pull it together so one more branch is forming on the blacksmithing craft tree and someday there will be others who can say, “My grandfather was a blacksmith.”
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