‘Under a spreading chestnut tree,’ but whither the smithy goes?

“Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands; the smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands ... ” – Opening lines from “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One day, standing in front of John Ellsworth’s Preservation Forge, I recited the first nine words of Longfellow’s famous, and melancholy, poem. The Lewes smithy stopped me right at that point, where I knew no more by heart.

“Do you know why it was important for the forge to be beneath the chestnut tree?”

“Dense shade cast by the chestnut in the summer. Hot forge, cool shade. Makes sense to me.”

“That works,” he said. “But that’s not the primary reason. The most important reason is the darkness cast by the shade. When you’re standing at the anvil, after you’ve drawn the metal you’re working on out of the forge, you have to be able to see which way the glowing heat is flowing so you know how best to direct your strikes for best advantage.”

Like that fact, much knowledge has entered my brain at the blacksmith shop. Fitting. This is where the Lewes Philosophical Society formed and met for a few years, with cigars and Scotch and lots of beers.

This is where horseshoe tournaments echoed the clanging of the hammer and anvil, sometimes in driving rain. Those tournaments gave way to anvil-tossing competitions: James Allen, reigning champion. Anvil-tossing eventually branched into punkin’ chunkin’, gutter golf and hatchet tossing, and other adventures like railroad jeep riding, midnight-midwinter oyster tonging in the Broadkill, and New Year’s Eve cannon blasts on the stroke of the hour on Second Street, when the old year breathed its last second.

While these adventures were being forged in spirited minds – along with endless fireplace pokers, cooking forks, hanging hooks, commissioned gates with thick, elaborately twisted vines and veined leaves, and skeletal fishes of various shapes and sizes – hand-carved, miniature black and white Holsteins grazed outside in green grass. They stood in tiny herds not far from the steps of the historic Fair Harbor house that John and Hope have called home for decades.

Brightly painted faucet flowers stood in that same patch of grass in the warm sun of spring and summer, another of the many manifestations of Ellsworth’s active, artistic, and fabricating mind and hands.

It’s said that the more active the mind, the greater its need for play. Ellsworth has been the king of play in downtown Lewes for a very long time.

But now, this long-running, steadily evolving work of performance art is coming to an end. Real estate For Sale signs now stand in the grass where the Holsteins once fattened and the faucet flowers bloomed.

For months, John has been cleaning out his shop, a gargantuan task in itself. He’s grumbled about it plenty through the years but this time he’s serious.The hustle and bustle of downtown Lewes have become too much for the smithy.

He longs for the quiet of the country, reminiscent of his family’s farm where he grew up in Ohio’s Ashtabula County. He and Hope have picked out a new home on a piece of high ground along Marshy Hope Creek, a tributary of the Nanticoke River, not far from Hurlock in Maryland’s Dorchester County.

If all goes as planned, they will make their move when the alternating warm and cool  breezes of coastal spring begin to blow.

There’s an irony in contemplating the end of Preservation Forge, but perhaps its justification comes in a few of the closing lines of Longfellow’s poem:

“Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose.”