THE
COLONIAL BLACKSMITH
by
Frank Overton, M.D.
Long Island Forum
March 1944
A sketch by William O. Stevens from his book
"Discovering Long Island".
The
Colonial Blacksmith
The word blacksmith means a worker in the black metal,-
that is, iron. During Colonial days he ranked next to the
minister of the Gospel as the most essential member of
the community, and in Brookhaven Town a special grant of
land was offered to a blacksmith who would settle in
Setauket. He had to be a man of great ingenuity and skill
in order to make and repair the iron utensils which were
in common use.
My great-great
grandfather Isaac Overton was a blacksmith in Coram, and
his ledger of 200 pages, posted between the years 1767
and 1774, reveals the scope of the services which he
rendered to the people as a skilled maker and repairer of
their house-hold utensils and farming implements.
The first
twenty pages of the ledger indicate that he recorded 388
charges for his skilled services, and doubtless he did
two or three times as many items of work for which he
received cash. I therefore made a record of them.
The population
of Brookhaven Town during the period covered by the
ledger was slightly over 2000, and it is probable that
Isaac Overton served half the people. The special
importance of the record of his jobs is that it reveals
the kind of work for which the people depended on the
blacksmith. Nearly one quarter of the items were for
shoeing horses, and one half were for shoeing or
"ironing" wooden plows.
The 388 items
listed in his ledger from 1767 to 1774 were made up of
mending adz, and irons, augers, making ox upsets, mending
base irons, auger bits, making bail for parts, bolts,
burning irons, cart irons, repairing chains, making
chimney irons, chopping knives, fixing chisels, making
bell clapper, eel spears, fire plates, hay forks,
gridirons, hinges, hog rings, mending scythes, spades,
making spikes, spindles, staples and hoops, mending all
sorts of kitchen utensils, farm implements, tools, 87
horse shoeing jobs and 198 plow iron jobs.
Information edited by
Dusty Drago
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