Hammerin’ Out a Living

Visiting family pictured from left are, Bert and Lorena Carl, Minnie Garrard Stewart and her husband Marion Stewart. Minnie and Marion lived on the Mattie Rawlings farm at East Fork.

His most essential equipment consisted of a forge, or furnace, an anvil, a heavy secure block to place a piece of iron, large metal tongs, hammers, and chisels to shape, flatten or weld the iron.

Blacksmithing is a very old craft and most towns and villages had their favorite local “Smithy”, to not only shoe their horses, but to repair tools, plows, axes and farm implements.

There were several blacksmiths in Sharpsburg, J.D. Hovermale, Charles Arnold and Andrew Hunt, to name a few, operated blacksmith shops in 1900s.

Bert Carl, became the central figure in the community in the mid-1920s.

Born May 31, 1890 in Montgomery County to Benoni and Margaret Darlington Carl, Bert Thompson Carl started as an apprentice blacksmith in Winchester, in 1906.

He married Lorena Helen Bryant in the summer of 1910 and sometime in the mid-1920s he moved his family to Sharpsburg, where he set up his own shop on Montgomery Street. Bert and Lorena were the parents of 11 children.

Bert’s day began at sun up with a line of horses waiting to be shod, most of which were pleasure or show horses with some of their owners traveling from 150 miles away.

If there were enough horses that needed attention, sometimes Bert would travel to the owner’s stables, but he preferred working from his own shop since the trip would require him to load all his equipment.

In 1956 Phyllis Byron interviewed Bert and during their conversation he told her, “most people imagine that a blacksmith might have a hard time making a living, but my work has never slackened, I just wished that it would sometime. Even during the depression, horse’s shoes wore out just the same as they did in good times. In a few years the trouble will not be to find work for a blacksmith but to find a blacksmith for the work. For it seems that no new blood is taking up the “call”.

With the arrival of winter, Bert kept busy building farm sleds, working on wagons and renovating buggy wheels.

According the story written by Mrs. Byron, in the winter of 1955, Bert T. Carl crafted a gate from horse shoes for the fence in front of his home as well as a foot scraper.

Although the age-old trade of hammering out a living as a blacksmith is now a thing of past, there are still a few farriers to keep the horses shod.

The craft of actual blacksmithing today is mostly reserved for artisans who create metalwork pieces.

Even though some artist often uses the same tools, techniques and process the old timers did many years ago, it is the enduring spirit of a towns local “Smithy” that leaves a lasting memory.