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Blacksmith Shop Excavation, what is it?


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Excavating stone blacksmith shop on our farm near Pittsburgh, PA.  My 3x great grandfather was a farmer and blacksmith.  In addition to many nails, hinges, hooks and a wooden knife, just found a metal form of some sort.  Shop was probably used from 1830-1900.

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Tapered pipe is for the tapered bellows nozzle.  The arched toroid forms the "ducks nest" form of firepot, there would have been a clinker breaker ball in the center on a metal rod going crossways to the bellows nozzle.  You can see examples in the old Sears Roebuck catalogs from around 1900 and I have one in good usable shape.

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I'm going to assume that you are not a blacksmith and are unfamiliar with blacksmithing jargon and terms.  A "tuyere" (several alternate spellings, pronounced "tweer") is where the air from a bellows or blower is introduced into the fire to make it hotter.  It is usually from either the side or the bottom.  The round part of your artifact is called the "duck's nest" and holds the base of the fire.

This is a cool and evocative artifact that says "blacksmith shop" as definitively as an anvil.  I would carefully de-rust it, possibly with electrolysis, seal it with a preservative, label it with it's history and excavation date, and hang it on my shop wall "as a treasure of my house and lineage."

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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Hey Chip, nice find. I was thinking tuyere but wasn't sure. 

Are you just excavating or metal detecting? 

Evaporust would work but you'd be better getting the heavy rust off first to save the solution. Something like that does better in an electrolysis tank. Then as george mentioned, preserve it with a write up of its location and history that you know of.  Preserving it you could coat it with boiled linseed oil or boil it in wax and wipe off the excess after then let it dry.

What other things have you found there? I do a bit of metal detecting. It's fun to unearth history and try to figure out the who, what, when, where, how and why. 

Where around pittsburgh of you don't mind me asking. I'm about 45minutes south.  

 

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Welcome from the Ozark mountains. We have several members in your location, which by the way we won't remember once leaving this post, hence the suggestion to add it in your profile. That is a very nice artifact and having the history on it is icing on the cake so to speak.

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Thanks all for the help!  I'd googled blacksmith tools for several hours and hadn't found anything remotely similar.  I'll check out Sears Roebuck as suggested.  The shop is located near a brook in a hillside about 150' from the original house.  My father always pointed to the picture below and said, "that's where the two story blacksmith shop was..."  In a number of the pictures below you can match up the elm and maple stumps on the left and right respectively.   I'm down 20 courses of the three stacked stone walls and haven't gotten to the floor yet.  I'm using a 1/2" hardware cloth sieve to go thru all the dirt and keeping track of where in the dig I find items.  I've found one small piece of coal, a 6" knife with a wooden handle, 100+ nails, hooks, flat stock with holes--might have been for making nails.  An item probably removed when the building fell in was the 6" vise pictured below which I use regularly.  Profile updated...

Daswulf,

I'm in Independence Township, Beaver County about 10 miles west of the airport.  Folks have had more luck finding arrowheads than metal items lately.

 

 

 

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A lock, wegde and spring would get that vise working a lot better. They can be made fairly easily. 

Cool dig, looks like fun. There was a site called pennpilot where you could look up old aerial survey photos from the late 30's till the mid 60's or so. The site is down but there is another one now that took over the info from the site. I can't recall what the site name is now. It was really interesting and helpful in locating some older structures (if they weren't obstructed by forest).

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10 hours ago, Chip McCoy said:

the 6" vise

That is what is called a Blacksmith leg or post vise. The leg is usually set on the floor with the acorn anchored in a plate with a hole in it which prevents the vise from twisting and allows for heavy hammering on work pieces. There is a section on vises and there are many pictures of the locking wedge's and spring Daswulf referred to. Here are a couple of pictures of our leg vise wedges and another clamped in it I was restoring, making the spring.

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Edited by Irondragon ForgeClay Works
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Chip:  The reason a post vice has a leg is that you can pound on something in the vice and the impact is carried down through post to the floor.  This makes it more solid than one just mounted on a bench where the impact would be absorbed by the bench and perhaps give a bounce back.  My post vice would be too short for me if the bottom of the leg was on the floor.  So, I have a length of 4x4 mounted between the floor and the bottom of the leg.

What would be very cool is if you unearthed the anvil and or tongs and other blacksmith tools.  Like the vice they probably wouldn't have suffered much from being buried for decades.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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  • 10 months later...

Chip, did you see my post?;

I think you have half of what I have.  My property has an ice pond and the house was built in 1860 or 61.  Would there have been a blacksmith shop to maintain ice working tools?  Seems that it would not be necessary but I don't know.  Anyway it's interesting that we have both dug up a similar unknown artifact.

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One of the more interesting bits of equipment for commercial ice harvesting was the ice plow, which was used to score the ice before it was broken out. Each tooth cut down about 1/4", so a single pass would deepen the cut by about 2". When the cuts were about 2/3 the depth of the ice, sections would be split off with breaker bars and floated to where they would be taken from the water and broken up into smaller chunks for transportation.

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Interesting thing that ice plow!  I really should look for pictures at our small town historical archives.  It is my understanding that the ice blocks were floated over to the dam where there was a water powered elevator for lifting the blocks to the top of a slide which slid them to the ice houses.  I had assumed the blocks were cut by saw.  I have a couple saws and push/hook tools that came from yard sales around here as there are several ponds that used to supply Boston with ice.  I've been digging by the ice house foundations.

Would anybody ever wonder about what the horse might leave behind on the ice?  Hopefully the ice was just used to keep stuff cold and not for your drinks.

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There's an ice plow mounted on the wall of a barn just up the way from my mom's place in Vermont; I don't know if there's any local connection with the ice trade, though.

Here are a couple of videos of people who still put up ice the old-fashioned way (albeit with gasoline-powered saws rather than horsedrawn plows):

 

 

 

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My pond is small but it is one of a chain (the last of four) of small ponds.  A mile or two away it drains into a much larger pond.  While watching the videos, I remembered that the person I bought this place from told me there is supposed to be parts of the water wheel elevator mechanism buried in the yard.  She indicated it might be where a large maple now grows so probably will not be digging for it.  Other old timers around town tell me that Henry Ford took the water wheel for his museum.  I also heard that the pond was salted in the spring to prohibit weed growth.  By winter the salt had all washed away leaving clear water for clear ice.  It would be exciting to find a buried ice plow! 

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8 hours ago, Gazz said:

Would there have been a blacksmith shop to maintain ice working tools?

Your complex may or may not have had a blacksmith shop, as Thomas said. But if it did, the blacksmith was not located close enough to the ice house that you'd be finding pieces of his equipment under and near the ice house foundations. You simply do not put heat sources like a forge next to an ice house. It melts the ice. (I belong to a club that has a working ice house and we're really sensitive to heat sources nearby.)

A possibility is that after refrigeration came along, a blacksmith moved into the vacated ice house.

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The thing about historic sites, they were occupied for a long time because it was a good place to live, farm and conduct business. What was the ice house and called the ice house long after it ceased to used for an ice house may well have been used as a farm shop in later times, second, forge fires, especially small farm forges aren’t necisarnaly large and hot. They weren’t forging anvils or locomotive parts. This doesn’t preclude farm maintenance shop sharing a wall with the ice house. True it’s unlikely an ice house house and a commercial blacksmiths shop shared a common wall at the same time, but not impossible. 
another common thing would be to use the foundations as a midden in later years. Not uncommon to find old roundhouses filled with field stones and other refuse in Europe were the old hole in the ground was a convenient place to deposit such. 

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