The Blacksmith Shop

Inside the stockade of the reconstructed Fort Vancouver, on the north bank of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, paths of decomposed granite lead to the southeast corner and the Blacksmith Shop. The floor inside is gravel. There are bumps and dips at the doorways, and the room is often dim, darker still on a cloudy day. Staff and volunteers work here making historically accurate tools and hardware from iron, as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s smiths did in the 1800s. A stop runs five to thirty minutes.

In October 2015 the visiting master blacksmith Jay Close stood in the shop holding tongs and glowing metal in one hand and a hammer in the other. He flattened a piece on the anvil that would be curved to hold the handle of a garden rake. He had come to demonstrate and to give tips to the volunteers. The Columbian’s account of his visit began in the small historic garden at the fort entrance. With 1,500 acres of vegetables once under cultivation, it noted, the company’s gardeners must have needed rakes.

The demonstrations depend on volunteers. They are enrolled as Volunteers-in-Parks and trained through the Trades Guild, and an apprentice program is being developed with park staff. Their work is limited to what the company’s smiths did in the shop during the fur trade era, and it centers on British blacksmithing of about 1825 to 1846. The ranger at the Contact Station just inside the fort gates takes the entrance fee. On the morning of a visit, the station can say whether a smith is expected.

The building represents the shop as it stood in 1845–46. In those years the work went on every working day. The smith built a fire of coal or charcoal and pumped a bellows to drive it upwards of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. He laid in bars of wrought iron or steel shipped from Britain until they turned red-hot, then bent and beat them on the anvil. The Park Service describes the shop of that time as often sweltering and dirty.

A bellows under a fir

When the company arrived in the winter of 1824–1825, the nearest blacksmith shop was at Fort George, on the Oregon coast near present-day Astoria. The builders of the first Fort Vancouver, on a bluff above the river, needed nails and tools. William Cannon supplied them. He was an old Astorian, entered in the company’s records as William Canning. In late 1824 or early 1825 he set up bellows and an anvil under a tree, up the hill north of that first fort, and pounded out nails and other construction hardware. Tradition, as the Park Service historian John A. Hussey recorded it, puts the forge under a majestic fir. Hussey thought that iron work for repairing the brig William and Ann, which anchored off Fort George on April 11, 1825, was perhaps done there.

Early in 1829 the fort moved down onto the river plain, and the smithy went with it, inside the pickets. Its exact location is not known. The shop chosen for reconstruction was a different building, put up between about 1836, when the stockade was enlarged to the east, and 1841. On July 25, 1841, Lieutenant Emmons of the Wilkes expedition drew a ground plan marking the “Blacksmiths shop--4 furnaces” in the extreme southeastern corner of the enclosure. Two sketches by members of the same party, one by Eld and one attributed to Agate, show two structures in that corner. The author of the park’s historic structure report could not account for the discrepancy. Henry N. Peers’s “Line of Fire” map, drawn shortly after the great fire of September 1844, shows one building there. Lieutenant Vavasour’s plan of late 1845 shows the “Smith’s Shop” on about Emmons’s spot, with an “Iron Store” directly east of it.

Vavasour’s fellow officer Henry J. Warre spent the winter of 1845–46 at the fort and later wrote: “Within the stockade were several dwelling houses, a kitchen, oven, blacksmith’s house and shop, and cooperage.” The structure report found no supporting evidence for Warre’s account. Its author observed that a shop with four forges would have been crowded, noisy and dirty, and that its inventories list nothing for domestic use. The question of whether any smith lived within the pickets remains open.

Four furnaces and eight men

H. H. Spalding, arriving with the Whitman party in the fall of 1836, counted “8 or 10 blacksmiths constantly at work.” In October 1838 James Douglas told the London directors that nine “tradesmen and others” were engaged at the “Forge.” The rolls for that outfit list only four blacksmiths, so the others were apparently laborers or voyageurs assigned to help. The clerk George B. Roberts later recalled eight men in the shop, seemingly in the mid-1840s. The Outfit 1845 rolls name four smiths. George Aitken drew £35 a year and had served about ten years, and by salary he was the chief. Joseph Ovide Beauchamp, George Folster (b), and Thomas Scott drew £30 each. One Park Service page says the fort at one point employed five blacksmiths in two shops, with another shop upriver at the sawmill. Another says at least four worked at any one time.

The sawmill shop, several miles upstream, is better described than the one inside the fort. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes visited in 1841 and wrote that it made axes and hatchets for the trappers: “Fifty of them, it is said, can be manufactured in a day, and twenty-five are accounted an ordinary day’s work.” He added that the Indians who sought them were very particular that the axe have a certain shape, “somewhat like a tomahawk.”

The shop in the southeast corner was the principal depot smithy. It produced bolts, eyes and straps for building and repairing ships and barges, down to the finest parts for beaver traps and gun repair. It also turned out nails of many sizes, hinges, door pulls and hasps. In 1836 Narcissa Whitman reported the smiths “all” employed making farming utensils for the American Board’s Oregon missions. A visitor in the early 1840s wrote that the “best Cary ploughs can be had to order from an excellent blacksmith at the place at 31-1/4 cents per pound.” The Sale Shop inventories of the mid-1840s list “country made” hunters knives, canoe adzes, swingletree irons, crooked knives, drawing knives, horseshoes and fish spears.

Large quantities of finished ironware still came from England. The choice turned on cost. On March 20, 1843, Chief Factor McLoughlin wrote: “We have ordered 50 of these traps with springs on trial, and if the springs answer our purpose and are cheaper than we can make them here, we shall order all we require from England.”

Sea coal from London

Coal for the forges was bulky and took cargo space from more profitable goods. In 1839 the London directors told McLoughlin they meant to send “no Coals” in 1841. He answered on November 20, 1840. Coal from Vancouver Island and the Cowlitz River had been tried and found wanting, he wrote, and charcoal he had made from local woods in 1826–27 had not answered. “You will see the absolute necessity there is that you send us coals by the Vessel to sail from London in 1841,” he wrote. The Governor and Committee relented for 1841 and 1842. They suspected, however, that he had made his charcoal wrong, “as the best iron of Sweden and Norway is produced and worked by charcoal made from fir.”

Governor George Simpson, at Sitka late in 1841, arranged for the Russian American Company to send two charcoal burners for a year. One reached the depot the next spring. McLoughlin reported that the Russian had failed, having found that “the wood of this place, does not answer to make Coals so well as that at Sitika [sic].” The imports of sea coal continued.

The trade in skilled smiths thinned after that. David Smith, serving in Outfit 1852, was the last man listed as a blacksmith on the Fort Vancouver rolls. In the summer of 1857 Chief Factor Dugald Mactavish told W. F. Tolmie at Nisqually to get his beaver traps from Victoria. “I have had some springs made but they are not the thing,” he wrote. “There are in fact few black smiths in the Country who understand how to temper them.” On June 15, 1860, the day after the company abandoned the post, a board of army officers found the shop standing in its old position, “long since abandoned” and ruinous. The fort burned to the ground in 1866. Whether by accident or arson remains a mystery.

Strap iron and a quenching pit

By 1947 the fort site was an open field. That year the Park Service archaeologist Louis Caywood collected 3,555 pieces of strap iron from the blacksmith shop. His excavations there in 1947 and 1952 turned up fourteen parts of trade axes in various stages of manufacture. From them the process could be traced and four sizes measured, from 2 inches wide down to 1-1/4. Detailed work began in the fall of 1973 under J. J. Hoffman. In 1974 his crew uncovered a soot-stained floor, a forge clean-out pit, an anvil foundation and a barrel-lined quenching pit. Rectangular postholes along the west wall apparently marked workbenches, vise frames and post drills.

The 1961 act made Fort Vancouver a national historic site and opened the way to reconstruction. In the fall of 1977 the regional office, looking for economies, considered dropping the shops. Staff led by Sam Vaughn, chief of interpretation and resource management, urged keeping them. Phase III of the reconstruction began in December 1980 with Lewis Koue and Murray Slama as consulting architects, and the shop was finished by September 1981.

In March 1982 the park hired Michael Darrig as museum technician and blacksmith to furnish the shop and develop living-history interpretation. Darrig and Superintendent James Thomson disagreed over the shop’s basic purpose. In 1987 Darrig won a classification appeal that made his position a wage-grade blacksmith. In 1990 Dave Herrera replaced Thomson and supported the program’s growth.

Darrig began recruiting and training volunteers in the spring of 1982. That first year some thirty volunteer blacksmiths worked an average of five days a week. By late spring they were producing iron objects for the Blacksmith Shop itself and for the Indian Trade Shop.