Tom Kennon's Blacksmith Shop

Blacksmiths were among the most important people in pioneer communities, serving settlers who arrived by horse- and oxen-drawn wagons and depended on them for shoeing animals and making or repairing a wide range of tools, wagons, guns, gigs, and farming implements. In the rocky Ozark Hills, shoeing horses and oxen was especially important, and although oxen became rare after the turn of the century, horseshoeing remained in demand. Tom Kennon, whose family came to Missouri before the Civil War and settled in Ripley County, was born there on July 2, 1884, and worked as a skilled blacksmith for more than sixty years. He married Pearlie Freeman in April, 1906; after her death in 1926, he married Nellie Holland, who died in 1939; and in September, 1941, he married Dolas Mackley. He fathered seventeen children and adopted four, raising and schooling twentyone children. The original building that housed his blacksmith shop was constructed soon after 1910, and Kennon, already a blacksmith, moved his tools from a smaller building into a similar one about 1920. He stopped working in his shop after 1980 at age 96 and died at age 104 on August 17, 1988.

Doniphan, Missouri · United States