The bills and accounts quoted a few pages back, and others, give ample evidence that most colonial smiths could read and write—although their spelling (like George Washington’s) might have a way of its own. At least one Williamsburg blacksmith, Hugh Orr, seems to have been quite a reader; at his death in 1764 he left a library of about forty books. But neither he nor any other colonial smith sat down to write out and illustrate a description of the work he did and how he did it.

This is not intended to be a how-to-do-it manual either. A few pages of text and pictures can hardly substitute for the apprenticeship of as much as seven years through which a blacksmith gained mastery of his craft. Only the close daily supervision of an expert and years of practice will enable a smith to know when the eye of his fire is large enough—but not too large ... when the forced draft of his bellows has made the fire hot enough—but not too hot ... when his iron is red enough—but not too red ... when his hammer blows fall heavily enough—but not too heavily to accomplish the particular job at hand.

Readers unfamiliar with the processes and products of a smithy are likely to be strangers also to many of the smith’s tools—which makes for something of a problem in trying to describe them. For this and other reasons it seems wise to start with what may be the most familiar items today.

Nails. In the early years of the Jamestown colony land was plentiful and nails were scarce. They, like every other object of iron—except the “little chissels” mentioned by Captain John Smith—had to be brought over from England. When the soil of their tobacco fields was worn out, planters simply took up, cleared, and planted new land farther west. Sometimes they set fire to buildings on the abandoned land in order to salvage the nails for re-use, a practice that was forbidden by law in 1644.

However, nails were not difficult to make if one had a supply of wrought-iron rods and a few tools. Frontier farmers—which in eighteenth-century Virginia meant those living one or two hundred miles to the west of Williamsburg—sometimes spent winter days in nailmaking. The fireplace served as forge, and even the younger members of the family could wield tongs, hammers, and cold chisel or man the vise.

Where there was a blacksmith, as we have already seen, he—or more likely his apprentice—made the nails. James Anderson estimated that eight boys could turn out twenty-five thousand nails in a week. Isaac Zane, who had an ironworks in the neighborhood of Winchester, owned “17 nailors tools great & small” and “2 nailors anvills.” The smith probably started with iron several feet long, about one-quarter-inch in width and the same thickness, produced in a slitting mill. His first procedure was to draw them down—and here we come to the first terminological stumbling block. Drawing down (or drawing out or beating out) is the smith’s phrase for thinning and lengthening a piece of metal by heating and hammering it. The contrary process of thickening—by hammering on the end of a rod—is called upsetting and is the technique used in making the head of the nail. Before he did that, though, the smith, having drawn down the rod to the proper thickness for the nails to be made, cut them to the desired length. Most likely he did this on a hardie, which is like a chisel held with the point upward in the square hardie hole of the anvil.

Horseshoes. Hugh Jones in 1724 wrote that horseshoes were “seldom used in the lower part of the country, where there are few stones.” It is true that the soil of tidewater Virginia tends to be sandy and free of stones, so that horses could and did go unshod much of the time. Yet there is ample evidence—some of which we have seen in the accounts excerpted above—that blacksmiths and farriers worked in the Williamsburg area at making and mounting horseshoes.