There were no trips to the city in those days to get a new part or a piece. They came to the forge with these really weird, broken pieces of things and he would, between hot and cold and some kind of things he used and vices and so on, he put them back together and saw the people back to their work.

As I remember the blacksmithing business [the forges were], say, about five miles apart. These blacksmiths served the farmers and others in the district who needed horseshoeing and other farm work. Now, as Irecall it, down at the far end of the second Pinette Bridge, George Docherty worked at blacksmithing. And then there was my father, and then Haywood MacLean up in Melville a little bit further on. And each blacksmith had his farmers, the way a store has its certain customers. They always stuck to the one blacksmith.

They began the lineup at seven o’clock in the morning, before [my father] left the house. Then, as people came to the shop, they would be sent up to the house to have a cup of tea. And a cup of tea was two or three cups of tea, a sandwich, a piece of pie, a bun, and something else, you see. Then, everyone who was at the shop at 1 1:30 or 12 o’clock when mealtime came, they’d come up to the house. Usually five or six on a lot of days would sit down to the table with the family and then stay up in the warm house, probably talking to my mother, until it was time to go down and get their horse, which was either at the barn or at the forge.

I think my father spent as much money in feeding people as he [made] from the work that was done in the shop.

Expert Work

It cost 25 cents to Change the shoes and 50 cents to make new shoes. That was the kind of money that was going.

It took one blacksmith all the time shoeing horses, particularly in the wintertime. Horses had to be shod in the wintertime before they slipped on the ice and broke their bones, and before they’d be able to pull any kind of a load. And then they had to be shod a little bit differently in the summertime to get their feet into the ground to pull machinery, you see.

The horse’s hoof is sort of thick shell, you know, not solid, like one might expect. I think probably half an inch or so is about the thickness of a horse’s hoof. And then the inside of his foot is live flesh.

There were two ways of shoeing a horse. One was to take the shoes off that were on the horse and put new calks [on them] that would stick in the ground; and then those shoes would eventually wear down so small that you couldn’t nail them to the horse’s foot. [The other was to] go, bring in

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