The village blacksmith was an important person in rural America. An essential craftsman and merchant, the blacksmith was responsible for making repairs and indispensable items such as horseshoes, farm and kitchen tools, his merchandise and expertise an integral part of the currency. Every village, including ours, required certain institutions to function well and independently – a church, a school, a store, a tavern, and a blacksmith.
In early times, no farm was without its own forge, Susan Jewett Griggs wrote in “Folklore and Firesides”, but the blacksmith was vital to the farmer and the housewife alike, shoeing the horses and the oxen, and supplying the pots and pans, hammers and nails, handles and hinges, axes and shovels, sickles and plows. The blacksmith was also a link in the system of currency. In “Discovering Hampton”, Janice Trecker writes, “an early nineteenth century farmer like William Alworth might get a blacksmith like Ebenezer Jewett or John Hovey to mend plows and other farm equipment in exchange for barrels of cider which would be sent to them after the apple harvest in the fall.”
According to Griggs, the first blacksmith to set up shop, or “coal house”, in the area was shortly after the Reverend Samuel Mosley’s 1735 arrival to our newly formed parish. Located on “the King’s Highway” in Westminster, Griggs notes “it would seem to have been an out of the way place for a village smithy to establish himself, but it was…convenient for shoeing the horses of the many travelers.”
The eldest sons of Benjamin Jewett II, a blacksmith who settled in Canterbury in 1732, Benjamin III and Ebenezer, were both blacksmiths who came to Hampton. Griggs reports that they “settled on the road that once connected Howard’s Valley and Clark’s Corners”, but it’s unclear as to where their “coal houses” were.
As Hampton’s population expanded, so did the need for blacksmiths, and eventually there were several in town, apparently busy enough to require appointments. “There must have been at least five smithies in Hampton seventy years ago,” Arthur Kimball recalled of the turn of the 20th century in Alison Davis’ “Hampton Remembers”. One is thought to have been in Bigelow in connection with the Litchfield mills, the blacksmith Fuller’s shop, located at 631 Pomfret Road, was associated with the mills at Hemlock Glen, the blacksmith Hovey’s shop is presumed to have been near the reservoir, and in all probability there must have been at least one in the southern section of town where there were several mills. And there was one, of course, in the town’s center, possibly two.
Earlier deeds of the lot where Jonathan Clark built the house at 289 Main Street, recently featured in “Country Living” magazine and still referred to as “The Misses Pearl’s”, show this parcel “with a blacksmith shop standing in the highway”, according to town historian Bob Burgoyne’s articles on the development of the village in “This Old Hill”. It wasn’t all that unusual for surveys to require structures, even houses, to be moved from the middle of the road and relocated. In this case, the blacksmith shop disappeared from this property’s deeds and its repositioning south east of the property suggests that it could have become part of the property at 276 Main Street where Clark’s 1858 survey identifies CC. Button’s grain pantry, a wagon shop, and one more small shop which might have been the original blacksmith’s. The village blacksmith shop was apparently equipped to shoe oxen as well as horses. Arthur Kimball recalled, “The blacksmith shop in the center of town run by Booth and then Henry Fuller and later Russell was equipped to shoe oxen. Oxen refused to stand on three feet, as a horse does, while the farrier works on the other foot. They have to be hung in a sling to keep them from tumbling onto the floor.” The stone structure on the corner of Cemetery and South Bigelow roads was presumably built for this purpose as well.
There is architectural evidence to suggest that a second blacksmith shop was located across from the Burnham-Hibbard House in a building which pre-dated the Little River Grange, constructed in 1906, because of the way the structure is built into the bank. This speculation is based on the fact that the building, the Community Center since the completion of renovations in 2008, has a berm barn foundation of dry laid stone, typical of blacksmiths’ shops, to prevent the forge fire from spreading.
The occupation was lucrative here in Hampton for over two hundred year, and blacksmiths were always busy. In “Hampton Remembers”, Arthur Kimball recalled: “Besides shoeing horses and mending tools, the blacksmith kept on hand a supply of small iron rods from which he manufactured nails in his spare time.”
But repairing tools, shoeing horses, and even making nails couldn’t keep the trade alive once the invention, and availability, of automobiles, became a reality in our small, rural town, and in 1907, Griggs reports, the village blacksmith shop, which “stood from earliest times at the north end of the long street”, closed. “Henry Fuller, who began his trade when ten years old,” she wrote, “was the last of the old time blacksmiths.”
“As the population of draft animals dropped,” Trecker noted, “blacksmiths switched to mechanical work and body repairs on cars.”
My husband Bob McDermott came to Hampton from Providence and worked for Walter Hoffman who owned the garage, and then in 1926 he bought the garage and ran it as the Hampton Hill Garage…there were still lots of horses around town but as they became scarce the need for blacksmiths lessened and those who knew that trade became garage mechanics. George Huling, the son of the blacksmith Greene Huling, worked in the garage for my husband.
Anna McDermott from “Hampton Remembers”
Over the course of more than a year, “Our Rural Heritage” has featured the section of our town known as the village, the center, the hill. Starting in June of 2023 with the 300th anniversary of the Congregational Church, we detailed the development of the homes, their later use in the “summer colony”, some of the “characters” who lived in them, the schools, the library, the firehouse, the Town Hall, businesses — taverns inns, and stores, the Burnham-Hibbard Museum, the Little River Grange, the Catholic Church, hidden behind the pines, the post office, the town pound, and the parades that have streamed along Main Street. Most of these institutions remain a vital part of village life, some of the buildings have been repurposed, and there is at least evidence of places which once were. So perhaps it’s fitting that we finish our exploration of the village with the blacksmith, and his shop, the only one that has entirely disappeared.
The Village Blacksmith
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The Smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can
And looks the whole world in the face
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming furge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church
and sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach.
He hears his daughter’s voice
singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,–rejoicing,–sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow