I have pursued this topic before, but my column about blacksmiths last week made me think of its application in the work and creativity of our old-time blacksmiths. In my lifetime, since the 1940s, our common practices have gone from generally saving and preserving things because we might fix them someday or might find another use for them, to generally throwing old or broken things away and buying new things. To some extent this change came because prosperous times came to our part of the country in the 1950s and 1960s. When we can afford new things, there is less motivation to repair or re-purpose our old things.
For the past several years, though, we have seen a heartening revived emphasis on recycling. Recycling is a form of the old-fashioned re-purposing that once was widely practiced, especially by our country people and their blacksmiths. In our recycling, the old things are melted down, losing the form they had, but the materials are preserved and reshaped and used for other purposes. One regrettable thing I observe about our new emphasis on recycling -- some people seem to suppose that people didn't recycle back in the old days. That supposition is really, really regrettable, sadly failing to appreciate the "repair and re-use and re-purpose" attitude which was prevalent among country people of the 1930s and 1940s.
Also, today, despite our admirable desire to recycle and to keep our natural world clean, we continue to work against ourselves with a never-ending glut of plastics and Styrofoam. These convenience materials seriously challenge our efforts to form a sound and comprehensive recycling policy, and seriously degrade our efforts to form a sustainable future in materials for manufacturing. The old-time people, as I see it, did an over-all better job of recycling than we as a society are doing today.
I talked today with an acquaintance who devotes considerable time to salvaging old materials and finding new uses for them. In the old days, he might have been called the junk man, who would come around offering to buy the worn and broken metal items a farmer had tossed onto his junk pile. Today, my acquaintance said he was taking down an old farm building, and doing it the old-fashioned way, dismantling the building's boards and timbers and removing the nails and other fasteners, preserving the old oak beams and planks for other uses. It is a reminder that oak lumber is becoming scarce these days, and new seasoned oak lumber is expensive. But my friend's project was very refreshing to me. I felt he was maintaining and practicing a valuable earlier attitude toward old but still usable building materials. Too often, today, our procedure in taking down buildings is to smash and bury rather than to dismantle and reuse. Of course I fully understand that it is cheaper today to use a dinosaur machine with huge crunching jaws than it is to pay men to take lumber apart with crowbars and claw hammers.
Here is a difference of attitude toward the old-time junk pile. Old-time farmers would, over time, naturally develop a junk pile on their premises. Now, to make a distinction which is sometimes hard for people to understand. That is, there is a difference between junk and "junk." We sometimes hear the old adage that "one man's junk is another man's treasure." That old thought gets close to the situation. Sometimes a piece of metal that is tossed onto the junk pile as "just junk" later becomes valuable when one realizes, you know, that piece could be used to patch this broken wagon frame, or to fix this broken brace on the plow. Sometimes a piece of "junk" can be welded onto a broken strap, and the result is stronger than a new piece. A plow or a disk or a trailer coming home from being repaired at the blacksmith shop might not be as pretty as a new one, but it often came back stronger than new, and not likely ever to break again.
Sometimes, also, our supposition today is that old-time craftsmen, such as blacksmiths, just did crude work. Even my own statements, such as describing a blacksmith's repair as strong but not pretty, may give a wrong impression about the skills of these workmen of the past. For example, Pea Ridge's own Johnny Clanton was not generally known for his artistry, but as an engineer and inventor he was quite skilled. One of his employers in the northwest U.S. needed a semi-trailer to haul a heavy bulldozer over the road, so Johnny built it for him. Back in Pea Ridge, he needed a tractor, so he built one out of truck parts and a large Kohler one-cylinder engine. Johnny wasn't that bad as an artisan either; just look at the decorative gate at the front of his property on McCulloch Street today. How is that for re-purposing and making do?
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621. The opinions expressed are his own.
Editorial on 05/06/2015