Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons

by John Michael Vlach

Charleston Blacksmith is a guidebook to the beautiful ironwork of Charleston created by the historic city's best-known blacksmith, Philip Simmons. Simmons's mastery of the craft and his love for the hammer and anvil are evident in more than one hundred photographs of his ironwork that are included in this book. Author John M. Vlach describes the methods, motifs, and materials employed in each piece and shares some of Simmons's personal recollections from the seventy years the blacksmith has spent perfecting his craft. A map of the city is included, giving both the location and a brief description of each creation by Simmons. Readers will quickly understand why Philip Simmons has been hailed a "living national treasure."

192 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1981

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe this is a book that was recommended for a course I took on Oral History in grad school, but not actually used in class. Therefore, I am only getting around to it now. It is the oral history of a single individual – a man who practiced a fading craft well into the Twentieth Century, but had learned skills used by practitioners in the 19th and earlier centuries. The connection with history is obvious, though the book finds even more fascination in the particular specialty its subject pursued as horseshoes and handmade tools became obsolete – the creation of decorative ironwork for fences, gates, and railings, which help to give his home town of Charleston, South Carolina, its distinctive look and feel. A lot of the book is devoted to a gallery of photographs showing these artworks, giving it the sense of being a guidebook or walking-tour of a city’s outstanding architecture.

Coming at this from an Oral History perspective, I was struck by the author’s choice to use quotations from his minimally-educated subject (Simmons quit school about the age of eleven) in the original Southern black vernacular, just as he, the graduate student interviewer, heard it. The author felt that, “any attempts to ‘correct’ Philip’s ethnic speech pattern would be pompous and presumptuous.” This is an ongoing debate in oral history presentation – is it more exploitive and insulting to write “nothin’” rather than “nothing” when that is what the subject says? I admit that I went in skeptical, and I was at first a bit distracted by the missing “g,” but over time I came to appreciate Vlach’s genuine respect for Simmons’s intellect (which simply isn’t expressed through formal speech) and to understand why he wanted to let him express himself in his own words.

In that sense, the real fascination of this book is how it goes from seeming to be a last-ditch effort to document a dying craft, to the celebration of the life of a talented artistic genius. By the end of the original edition, one of Simmons’s works is included in the Smithsonian Institute, but the added chapter of the revised edition is largely devoted to the recognition of the cultural significance of his work for the country, the State, and the city he lived in. My suspicion is that the publication of this book contributed in no small way to that trajectory. One also gains a certain knowledge of, and respect for, the work of smithing, which puts readers in touch with an alienated part of our production process. Although I thought of myself as having only a marginal interest in the subject going in hence its sitting on my shelf for so long), I really felt I got a lot out of this short volume.