Artisan With Fire

While every farmer needed basic blacksmithing skills to make or mend small simple objects like horseshoes and nails, only the village smithy had the expertise to craft substantial articles such as kitchen and farm tools, blades and hinges. A blacksmith shop's location in the center of town also made it an important place for social interaction. To create workable iron, ore had to be mined, crushed, then smelted, or melted, to extract usable metal. Because these were time-consuming, labor-intensive processes, the resulting metal was so valuable that it was repeatedly recycled into numerous necessary items.

South Carolina · United States