A kid at the hardware store asked me what a farrier was

I was picking up some 1/4 inch round stock in Springfield last week and a boy, maybe ten, pointed to the anvil logo on my shirt. His mom explained it was for a blacksmith, and he just looked blank. It hit me that twenty years ago, most folks around here knew what a farrier did because they knew someone with horses. Now it's a history lesson. I ended up showing him a picture of a shoe I made on my phone. How many of the old trade names are just gone now?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_dixon1mo ago

Actually, a farrier is a blacksmith who just does horseshoes.

miles9461mo ago

Actually, here's something nobody's bringing up. Those trade names are disappearing but the skills are just getting rebranded. My neighbor's kid works at a place that calls itself a "precision metal fabrication studio" and they do the same basic stuff a farrier would recognize. Bending, shaping, fitting metal to exact specs. The difference is they're making brackets for solar panels instead of horseshoes. The work itself didn't vanish, the context just changed. That kid at the hardware store might grow up to be a farrier for industrial robots or something.

gonzalez.reese17d ago

And it's funny, my uncle used to call himself a "metalurgical artist" on his business cards but he just fixed broken wagon wheels for Amish folks. The kid probably would've understood "horse shoer" better than either of those fancy titles. I guess the names we use say more about us than the work itself sometimes.