Iron

Note: This post is a sketch of a topic I hope to cover in more detail in a feature-length story. Stay tuned…

One of my oldest friends is the blacksmith Shel Browder. Shel retired a couple years ago from a long career at Colonial Williamsburg, and now does freelance work for a number of individual and institutional clients. Now blacksmithing is an even smaller profession than, say, archaeology…they ALL know each other, so it’s not too surprising that Shel connected with Lee Sauder. Lee is a well known smith and sculptor from southwestern Virginia, and he’s also one of the country’s real experts in the pre-industrial manufacture of iron. At last weekend’s project at the Virginia Museum of Frontier Culture in Staunton , Lee, Shel, Chris Furr the Museum's staff blacksmith, and a few Museum staff and volunteers helped resurrect the craft of bloomery iron.

Blast furnaces, such as those that operated at Pennsylvania’s Cornwall or Carlisle works or many other places in 18th century America, could produce iron continuously (i.e. remain in blast) for months, the liquefied iron pouring from taps at the base of the furnace into prepared sand molds, and hardening into solid bars called “pigs” (i.e. pig iron). Blast furnaces didn’t appear in Europe or anywhere else much before the 16th century. Prior to that, all the way back to the dawn of the Iron Age in Europe, Africa and Asia, iron was made in bloomery furnaces. These small furnaces persisted for centuries after blast technology appeared, and were likely employed in the earliest American colonies during the 17th century, and in out-of-the-way places worldwide.

Typically, these are small chimneys fashioned from clay, and equipped with a bellows. Equal weights of charcoal and roasted iron ore are fed into the top in incremental and alternating layers, and silica impurities (AKA slag) and molten but not-quite-liquid iron (a bloom) appear at the bottom. The process appears deceptively simple, but in fact is fraught with complexities not easily solved since the real experts have been gone for centuries. The scale also seems very limited, until one considers that the armories and all the tools of three continents were amply supplied by these small pre-industrial workhorses for centuries.

Lee has thrown himself at this process. He has read everything there is to read, talked with archaeologists, metallurgists, and other smiths, and even traveled to Africa to work with smiths who are trying to reconstruct their ancestor’s methods from traditions that may not have died out there until the 1950’s. He has failed spectacularly many times, but he has learned from all of them. He and Shel were kind enough to invite me down to observe last weekend’s demonstration (Lee’s 167th ) and I took some photos and video that will hopefully explain the basics of this nearly vanished industry.

Friday the 18th: Building and Hardening the Furnace

The furnace is constructed of clay tempered with sand and coiled around a wooden form. Each course of clay is bound with twine to help delay slumping and keep it generally in place.

Building the Furnace

When it’s complete, a perforation for the tuyere (a copper tube that will carry air into the furnace) and the mouth of the furnace are scribed in the wet clay, as is a small perforation near the top. Lee learned to put in this perforation from his African friends who explained that it was put there “so God can see”. When Lee asked if it was so God could see out or in, they looked at him like he was a stupid and crazy American (which, he opined, might have been true). A small fire is then built around the outside of the furnace, drying the clay a bit, and helping to keep it from slumping. The mouth of the furnace is then cut open, and the fire is introduced into the interior where it consumes the wooden form. After several hours of burning, the clay is hard enough to begin its life as a furnace.

Completed Furnace

Burning and Hardening the Exterior

Opening the Base and Burning the Interior

Burning and Hardening Friday Night

Mouth of the Furnace

Saturday the 19th : The Bloom

In the morning, preparations are made to actually smelt the iron. The bellows, in our case an electric blower that connects to a copper tuyere, is set in its receptacle at the proper angle. A hand operated bellows can be used, but once the 5 hour long smelt begins, it can never stop pumping or the tuyere will melt. A team of many bellows operators, or a water powered wheel, would be necessary. A preheating fire is kindled, and the mouth of the furnace is sealed with a clay patch. The patch is built in sections that can be removed in sections, first at the very bottom to drain off the slag, and later the rest will be removed to extract the ball of hot iron or bloom.

Setting the Tuyere

After preheating for an hour or so, the process begins. Alternating additions of wood charcoal and roasted iron ore are added at the top of the furnace. The ore is from a local source near Lee’s home, and it’s simply roasted in a wood fire to drive off excess water and make it easier to break into smaller fragments to facilitate melting. Lee also makes his own charcoal in a home-made contraption that, apparently, used to be a dumpster! Equal weights of ore and charcoal (I forget how much) are used in the smelt.

Charcoal

Roasted Iron Ore

The smelt proceeds for five hours or so. The internal temperature of the furnace reaches approximately 2800 degrees Fahrenheit! It sounds like a rocket ship. Longitudinal cracks appear releasing flames and hot gasses, but it holds together, and in fact, can be reused several times.

At about four hours, Lee breaks out the base of the mouth and hot slag pours out and puddles in front of the furnace. The slag is mostly silica with some iron and other inclusions. It flows around and puddles beneath the bloom now formed in the base of the furnace. Apparently there was so much bloomery slag laying around parts of Italy from Roman times, that Mussolini mined it and used it to produce iron and steel in modern blast furnaces during the Second World War. 

Preheating

Charging the Furnace

In Full Blast

Tapping the Slag

At about 5 hours all the ore and charcoal have been added, and the bloom is ready to extract.

Once out of the furnace, the roughly 20 lb bloom is carried to a nearby wet section of log for hammering and consolidation. The log is used because the red hot iron will burn its way into the wood creating a cradle for itself, making it much safer to hammer than it would be on a flat anvil. The hammering consolidates and aligns the bloom, and also eliminates some impurities.

  It’s then cut with an axe and hammers, and the smaller pieces can be reheated in a forge, and hammered into bars on an anvil.

These bars were what a bloomsmith produced and sold to blacksmiths, armorers, and other craftsmen, who then forged them into a variety of good and useful things.




Many thanks to Lee, Shel, and the good folks at the Virginia Frontier Culture Museum for allowing me the privilege of seeing one of the world’s oldest crafts preserved for the future!

Ignorance and Bliss

Nothing like death striking too close to home (twice) to focus the mind on the unknowable.

Poetry is hard, at least for me. I've never published any, and rarely write any. If good prose is fermentation, poetry is distillation: a lot more complicated.  But the muse is inscrutable, and therefore surprising. I sat down at the keyboard for maybe 45 minutes, and a poem emerged more-or-less fully formed. It came into the world as any good child should, yelling and full of hope.

I offer it for my cousin Caron and her girls and Dave's girls and parents and students, for all the Barones, and for anyone bereaved. JB

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Ignorance and Bliss

What do we know anyway?

Our dead don’t come back and tell us.

Faith conceals as much as it reveals.

Our minds play tricks on us, our hearts ache,

and we wonder.

We wonder what sits atop the clouds and the blue sky and utterly dark cold infinity

We wonder how you are

We wonder if you see us, if you know us still

We wonder how this could have happened

Answers are not forthcoming. 

Maybe we know that nothing endures, but even in that finality

It would seem there are exceptions.

A smile across a kitchen table

Heartfelt wisdom freely dispensed.

A belly laugh, a caress, a kiss

Love waits with us at a bus stop in the rain

Love bails us out of the drunk tank at 2:00 in the morning

Love shuffles into the nursing home before dinner most weekday evenings.

Love reviews the algebra homework again.

Love splits granite, endures waves, transcends,

runs through our generations like electricity, like blood.

We know this as certainly as we know our mortality

Maybe that’s all we need.

 

Fathers and Sons

Copyright, Joe Baker

Boiling Springs Pa, 2013

 

It’s the ornate 1920’s iron railing of the staircase that triggers the memory. The staircase leads to the train platform at the Harrisburg station. I am maybe five years old, and my grandfather and I have just walked down the staircase from the station to meet my dad. Pop, my dad called him Pop, held my hand coming down the stairs and the other hand reached up to grip the fancy hand rail. Dad is coming
home from Johnstown, or maybe Philly, from some Godforsaken place he had to go to work. When Dad arrives, he sweeps me up in his arms, and I am enveloped by love. This is one of my earliest conscious memories, a fragmentary wraith of neural activity and emotion more than 50 years old. It is now faded and worn to just a few threads, but it is precious to me and I hold it close.

I have just descended those same steps again. I am ensconced in a train, on the same line Dad took to Philly and Pop maintained during his decades working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. I am going to a funeral in New York for my first cousin Bob. Bob, 79, passed from this world a few days ago unexpectedly following a grave but fairly common heart operation from which he was expected to recover. The funeral will be tough. He raised five kids to adulthood, mostly by himself, and they are all wonderful people who returned the attention and kindness he gave them with much love. They will miss him terribly, and so will his wife and his brother, as will our entire extended family. However, after the funeral, when we have all gone home and returned to our own journeys through life, his wife and kids will discover something good and useful and probably unexpected.

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My dad, Charlie, was a piece of work; kind, funny, loud, big, tender hearted and generous of spirit, a very memorable character. He and Julie had two daughters separated by just a few years, then seven years later, I appeared (my uncle told me Charlie returned from a business trip on a Sunday, and none of the drugstores were open).  He was happy beyond expression that he now had a son, and he showered me with affection.  He worked a lot, like a piston in an engine, but whenever he was home, he spent time with his kids and we all basked in our father’s attention. Understand; Julie and Charlie weren’t Ozzie and Harriet, but we were happy, and certainly we were loved.

In 1969, around Christmas time, Charlie got sick, went to the hospital, and died. He was 55, I was 13. That was that.

This crushed us. I do not think my Mom ever really recovered from the blow. I went nuts for years, and passed through a prolonged and angry adolescence in this condition. I remember working at a local supermarket one evening, and seeing a man who looked a lot like Charlie loading groceries into his car. I began to have this fantasy that maybe Dad wasn’t really dead, and had gone to live a new life somewhere, and maybe we could find him and ask him to come home. On especially bad days, I would peer tearfully out of the windows of cars, buses and trains I was riding in and desperately look for him, but I never saw him. 

It took a long time, but the worst of it passed. What I was left with was a tendency to laugh rather than fume or cry at life’s outrages, a fondness for good food and drink, an enjoyment of the company of young folks and kids, a belief in the essential goodness of others, an ability to see both sides of most arguments, a heart that sometimes surprises or embarrasses me with its depth of feeling.  In the end I found Charlie, I was just looking in the wrong place.

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Sometime in the early 70’s, a year or two after Charlie’s death, my grandfather, Giuseppe DiRado, and my brother in law and one of his friends were bird hunting in a great sweeping field of corn stubble somewhere near Mt Joy Pennsylvania. Grandpop was in his 80’s, but despite debilitating arthritis he still loved to bird hunt, and despite cataracts that were making it hard for him to read a paper, he could still break 18 of 20 clay pigeons at a skeet range.  

We walked the field in a line, Pop to my right, the two younger men to my left, each of us about 30 yards distant from the other. A pheasant burst from the stubble in front of me, and I shot it. I ran to pick it up, but to my horror, found it alive though gravely wounded. It was terrified and in agony, and fought for its life. I had trouble holding on to it. I began to cry, and the younger men began to hoot at me and snicker. I felt a hand on my shoulder, it was Pop. For years he had moved very slowly, now, to my utter amazement, his hand shot forward, seized the bird by the neck, and administered the coup de grace with a violent and efficient snap. He placed the dead bird in the back of my vest, and his eyes were fixed not on me, but on my brother-in-law and his buddy. He didn’t say anything, or even glare, he just gazed on them steadily. The laughter faded to chuckles, then to smiles, then to silence. They were ashamed. He patted my head.

“You OK, Joe-boy?”

“Yes Grandpop.”

“OK, we go now.”

And we went.

This was my first inkling of what constituted a real man.    
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When I arrived at Fort Shirley last July, I found Jonathan Burns in a condition Charlie would have described as “a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.” Jonathan, a young PhD in his 30’s was running a Penn State archaeological field school at the site of an 18^th century frontier fort.  This means he was teaching, keeping notes, photographing, surveying, orienting visitors, making decisions, cheerleading, correcting and talking all at the same time. Everybody seemed to be having a wonderful time.

In part this was because of the site. Fort Shirley was one of a string of small frontier fortifications erected in 1755-1756 following the initiation of what is known in America as the French and Indian War. It was built around a trading post, and its inhabitants included the trader, his retinue, Native American allies of the British colonists, and Colonial Militia.  It’s in an out of the way corner of Pennsylvania, and so its archaeological signature is not muddled or destroyed by industrial land use, and the site is remarkably well preserved. The dark and distinctive stains of the palisade and defensive works are readily seen below the plowed soil and the trash and other features of the site have produced ceramic, glass, metal and stone objects in abundance from England and France and Holland and Africa as well as Native made items from local materials. There’s a lot to hold the students’ attention, but that’s not the only reason they’re enjoying themselves.

In no small measure it’s Jonathan. He pays attention to them, he pushes them, he teaches and encourages them. They feel involved and valuable, because they are. He’s the kind of teacher everyone should have, and I know where he learned the craft.

Jim Hatch taught archaeology at Penn State between 1976 and 2000.  A student’s professor, Hatch was intellectually curious, talkative, glib to acerbic in temperament, funny as hell and extremely smart. He is not widely known among the profession’s cognoscenti because he didn’t publish a lot of research. Truth is, while he was passionate about his research interests, he was much more interested in his students, undergrads and graduate students. He was Penn State’s Teacher of the Year, not its Archaeologist of the Year, Teacher of the Year, a couple times. He was a brilliant lecturer who could weave enthralling and beautiful fabrics from the sometimes meager evidence left in Native American archaeological sites. He was kind and encouraging to his students, though not beyond giving them a pedagogical boot in the ass if he thought they needed it. He took me under his wing in the 70’s, got me my first technical publication, and my first paying job, and believed in me when all available evidence suggested he should not do so. He became a friend. Likewise, a couple decades or so later, he took young Jonathan under his wing. Jonathan’s from the same rural corner of Pennsylvania as his field school site, and is not the product of anything that could be construed as privilege. But Hatch, as he so often did, saw something in the kid. He encouraged him, taught him, lit a fire under his ass. He got his BA, and went on to get his doctorate at Temple.

In 1998, Jim was digging at what turned out to be his last site in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. I went down to visit.  As I said, he loved to talk, and somewhere in the middle of a lengthy oration on the peculiarities of this site, he stopped and asked me “When was the last time you saw my son?” This was unusual for Jim. He was as unsentimental and sarcastic a bugger as you will ever meet, and he kept his professional and private lives firmly separated most of the time. He caught me off guard. After a pause to think, I told him it had been years. He told me “You oughtta see him now. He’s 22, and he’s a really impressive guy.” That’s all he said on the subject, but I filed it away.

A bunch of archaeologists now working in the Middle Atlantic and Southeastern states owe some portion of their career to Hatch, so when they buried him at the shamefully young age of 52 in 2000, the church was full. Hatch’s boy Chris stood up to speak. He was living in Colorado at the time. He had a roommate who was having some trouble with his father, as young men will. Then the roommate’s father died unexpectedly, and Chris’s roommate was distraught and bereft beyond words.  So it was, that at about 2:00AM Eastern time in the summer of 1998, Chris called his Dad. Once Jim determined that the boy was neither drunk nor in some sort of trouble, they had the sort of conversation that fathers and sons ought to have.  Chris finished his remembrance of his father with a joyous expression of gratitude that, before his father left this world, they knew how they felt about each other. I remember thinking “THAT’s why he wanted to talk about this boy!”

Jim is Jonathan’s model for the treatment of students, my model for how I treat interns and young employees, and that’s true of many of Jim’s former students and colleagues.  There are generations of kids who have benefited from Jim Hatch’s way of doing things that have scarcely or never heard of him. He would have liked that. 

Following my tour of the site, Jonathan tells me “Guess what…the Department Chair is on sabbatical and despite the fact I’m just an adjunct, they’ve asked me to teach the Eastern North American Prehistory course fall semester!” That was Jim’s signature course, the one that made me and a good number of peers become archaeologists. This causes me to suddenly tear up a bit, and Jon and I say a quick so long, because it apparently did the same thing to him.

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Bobby’s funeral was by turns difficult and inspiring. The wife of thirty years he married when he was a single father spoke of his quiet and unfailing love for her, and of how he told her when he proposed that he wasn’t looking for a mother for his children. They were his responsibility. He was looking for a wife. All five of his kids expressed their sorrow at losing their go-to guy, their rock. They lauded his acceptance of each of them as they were, not as he wished them to be. How his quiet kindness and complete dependability reflected his mother Nicky, who was most certainly the foundation of our entire extended family.  One of Bob’s grandsons paid a heartfelt tribute to a grandfather who called him his buddy as well as his grandson. One of Bob’s and my cousins played a breathtaking and beautiful “I Know You Rider” on the guitar with a broken finger. Lots of people who loved Bobby stood up and spoke for him. We’re all mostly Italians, and the tears fell like rain, sometimes through bright smiles.

Good men, good people, sink roots like trees into the soil of those they love.  The tree may get old or topple in a storm, but we all rise from the rootstock and we reach high.  When the wind blows hard, we can feel them down there nourishing us and anchoring us to bedrock.  In the coming months, Bob’s widow and children and brother will find when they instinctively seek solutions and not judgments for trouble, when they recognize irony and laugh at it, on days when they maybe feel like sleeping in but get up early to help a relative or friend hang a new set of kitchen cabinets, in silly and bawdy stories told after dinner over a few drinks, in moments when they stand tall and proclaim the truth in a loud voice, in a very low tolerance for bullshit, that Bobby has not gone anywhere. He will be in their hearts and their habits and in how they see the world as long as they are alive.

The people who teach us and care for us never really leave us. They are sort of immortal.