Under a spreading chestnut treeWhen I was a little boy, and my father read the poem to me, I remember the pleasure in his voice at that word "sinewy." Indeed, there was at time when every town of even modest size had at least one blacksmith. When did they go away?
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands ...
Jeremy Atack and Robert A. Margo answer the question in "Gallman revisited: blacksmithing and American manufacturing, 1850–1870," published earlier this year in Cliometrica (2019, 13: 1-23). Gallman is an earlier writer who classified blacksmiths as a service industry, while Atack and Margo argue that they instead should be treated as an early form of manufacturing. From a modern view, given the concerns over how technology may affect current and future jobs, blacksmiths offer an example of how a prominent industry of skilled workers went away. Atack and Margo write:
The village blacksmith was a common sight in early nineteenth-century American communities, along with cobblers, shoemakers, grist mill operators, and other artisans. Blacksmiths made goods from wrought iron or steel. This metal was heated in a forge until pliant enough to be worked with hand tools, such as a hammer, chisel, and an anvil. Others also worked with metal but what distinguished blacksmiths was their abilities to fashion a wide range of products from start to finish and even change the properties of the metal by activities such as tempering, as well as repair broken objects. ...
Blacksmiths produced a wide range of products and supplied important services to the nineteenth-century economy. In particular, they produced horseshoes and often acted as farriers, shoeing horses, mules, and oxen. This was a crucial service in an economy where these animals provided the most of the draft power on the farm and in transportation and carriage. The village blacksmith also produced a wide range of goods from agricultural implements to pots and pans, grilles, weapons, tools, and carriage wheels among many other items familiar and unfamiliar to a modern audience—a range of activities largely hidden behind their generic occupational title.
Blacksmithing was a sufficiently important activity to qualify as a separate industrial category in the nineteenth-century US manufacturing censuses, alongside more familiar industries as boots and shoes, flour milling, textiles, and clock making. The 1860 manufacturing census, for example, enumerated 7504 blacksmith shops employing 15,720 workers ... —in terms of the number of establishments, the fourth most common activity behind lumber milling, flour milling, and shoemaking. ...
As ‘‘jacks-of-all-trades,’’ they [blacksmiths] were generally masters of none (except for their service activities). Moreover, the historical record reveals that several of those who managed to achieve mastery moved on to become specialized manufacturers of that specific product. Such specialized producers had higher productivity levels than those calling themselves blacksmiths producing the same goods, explaining changes in industry mix and the decline of the blacksmith in manufacturing. ...
Consider the goods produced historically by blacksmiths, such as plows. Over time, blacksmiths produced fewer and fewer of these, concentrating instead on services like shoeing horses or repairs. But even controlling for this, only the most productive of blacksmiths (or else those whose market was protected from competition in some way) survived—a selection effect. On the goods side of the market, production shifted toward establishments that were sufficiently productive that they could specialize in a particular ‘‘industry,’’ such as John Deere in the agricultural implements industry. As this industry grew, it drew in workers—some of whom in an earlier era might have opened their own blacksmith shops, but most of whom now worked on the factory floor, perhaps doing some of the same tasks by hand that blacksmiths had done earlier but otherwise performing entirely novel tasks, because production process was increasingly mechanized. On average, such workers in the specialized industry were more productive than the ‘‘jack-of-all-trades,’’ the blacksmith, had been formerly. The village smithy could and did produce rakes and hoes, but the village smithy eventually and increasingly gave way to businesses like (John) Deere and Company who did it better. ...
During the first half of the nineteenth century, blacksmiths were ubiquitous in the USA, but by the end of the century they were no longer sufficiently numerous or important goods producers to qualify as a separate industry in the manufacturing census.