James Anderson was described earlier in these pages as Williamsburg’s foremost blacksmith during the years when his shop occupied a lot on Francis Street. Several of his ledger books are still in existence, some of them treasured possessions of Colonial Williamsburg. Among endless entries covering the laying of axes, hoes, plows, and colters, appear others that show the less routine aspects of Anderson’s daily work: mending a poker; making a nut for a bolt of a chair (probably a riding chair); dressing two mill picks; mending a lock; altering 40 window hooks; making a hasp and staple for a henhouse; providing handle, wedges, and ring for a scythe; fixing a new end to an oyster clamp; putting a handle on a “teakittle”; forging a well chain; making a “strike tier,” i.e., strakes for wagon wheel and nails to attach them; spindle for a wheel; prong for a dung fork; putting a hoop on a barrel; mending a coffee mill; 9 “fronts” and a rib for a griddle; 50 spikes; a pair of flatirons; mending and installing locks, keys, window bars, leg irons, and chains for the “lunatick hospital”; lengthening the bearer and adding a new middle foot to an andiron; “a Sett of Iron for a dressing table”; four breast plate buckles (for a harness); drilling a gun; mending an umbrella; “triming a horse feet”; making, mending, putting on, and taking off leg irons and hand cuffs for the jail.

Clearly everyone in town had to patronize the blacksmith sooner or later. He was, in a very real sense, a craftsman for all seasons.