Producing history and ironwork in an urban crucible (Part I)
27 August 2014 – David Rotenstein
Sam Smith’s blacksmith shop is part living history laboratory and part urban sustainability experiment. He is a former history major who turned passions for the past and metalworking into a business that produces objects, artisans, and history in contested space on the edge of a gentrifying Portland, Maine, neighborhood. His business, The Portland Forge, is a local craft shop that could succumb to a global process that is displacing artisans and small-scale industrial operations in cities worldwide.
Smith, 30, is a New Jersey native who completed a blacksmithing apprenticeship at Monmouth County’s living history park, Allaire Village. He moved to Maine in 2003 and opened a shop along the Penobscot River about four hours north of Portland. Its location near the Katahdin Iron Works site enabled him to collect iron ore from Ore Mountain, the historic ironworks’ source. Smith briefly enrolled in the University of Maine’s Machias campus before withdrawing after the school suspended its history major in 2010.
The blacksmith Smith opened The Portland Forge in a building in the Portland Company complex: a ten-acre industrial site that in the nineteenth century produced locomotives for the Grand Trunk Railroad. The Portland Company originally opened its complex in the 1840s on filled land claimed from Portland’s bay. This then-new urban space enabled rail and wharf construction as it supported new industrial plants. It was space that helped Portland become known as Canada’s winter port.
For much of the second half of the nineteenth century Portland prospered as the Grand Trunk Railroad’s Atlantic seaboard terminus. After freight transportation declined and Portland’s economy shifted to the sea and other sectors, disinvestment and decline took root in the city’s downtown and waterfront. Portland’s neighborhoods struggled through twentieth-century deindustrialization. By 1978, even the Portland Company had closed.
Today, the fortunes of this small city of 66,000 have changed substantially. Its location about two hours north of Boston and the economics of the region’s knowledge- and service-driven prosperity have made Portland an attractive place for Boston businesses to set up what geographer Loretta Lees describes as “back-office” operations for financial services firms. Reinvestment in the 1990s and municipal master planning have transformed areas in Portland’s downtown into trendy arts and cultural districts centered on the city’s art museum. New restaurants, coffee shops, galleries, bars, clothing stores, and performance spaces rapidly appeared in Portland’s Old Port District and the Congress Street corridor.
Plans for the Portland’s Eastern Waterfront zone include increased connectivity to downtown and new design standards for buildings and open spaces. Portland amended its zoning ordinance, and the zone was created to promote “a range of uses to achieve twenty-four [hour] urban vitality.” The historic locomotive works comprise one of six redevelopment areas within the zone, and the 2008 master plan recommends adaptive use for the site. The complex is described in the plan as “highly developed, but in need of significant structural and cosmetic repair.”
The Portland Forge was a good adaptive-use fit for a struggling former industrial area. Smith’s shop and his business model draw directly from historical antecedents with few modern interventions. There are no electrical tools, blowtorches, or other modern appliances in his shop; windows and the forge light it. A wood-burning stove provides auxiliary heat in the winter. Raw materials for the forge are recycled from junkyards and other local sources. Instead of employees, Smith trains apprentices.
“Because I don’t use those tools and those conveniences, I can keep my overhead low and make this a viable trade,” Smith explained in an interview earlier this year. He jokes that his business is so off the grid that if the power goes out, he will continue production uninterrupted. The apprenticeship system keeps him close to his roots in the craft. “I still reinforce the tenets of living history and I apply it to my everyday profession,” he said.
Smith opened his shop near the boundary where a previously gentrified area meets a neighborhood on the cusp of redevelopment. The Portland move enabled Smith to be closer to a customer base–architects and consumers–he had been servicing by commuting from upstate. He swapped a portable forge for space in the Portland Company complex. “As the word of mouth business picked up, I found myself frequently having to drive many hours south to do work, installs, quote, talk to clients, etcetera,” Smith said.
Smith continued to build his network of clients and community contacts. His business model relies on personal connections and networking, not advertising. “My market is custom [work],” he explains. “People come in with an idea and a dream or plans for an exact thing. Sometimes engineers or architects will come with an already drawn up plan saying they need this.” Many of Smith’s ironwork clients come from the ranks of new people building, renovating, and buying homes in gentrifying Portland neighborhoods.
Last year a developer bought the Portland Company complex. Redevelopment plans could displace Smith to enable construction of new condominiums in the strategically located site. “Portland’s Eastern Waterfront provides a unique location to combine the opportunities provided by deepwater berthing resources with the economic development potential of an historic and vital downtown commercial center,” wrote the city in its 2006 master plan for the area that includes the Portland Company complex.
Part 2 follows.
~David Rotenstein (Historian for Hire) is an independent consultant working in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and beyond.
Those who are interested in blacksmithing, might also consider checking out Kellogg & Sons Blacksmith Shop in New York’s North Country. Steve Kellogg was formerly blacksmith at The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown and now has turned his focus to his own shop. He’s an educator and historian as well–and an all-around nice guy.