View “The Blacksmithing Artist”

Photography by Raymond Boc
Written by Janine Latus

Blacksmithing, an art as old as the evolution of humanity, is once again seeing an upsurge in popularity, as craft schools, small workshops, and YouTube videos introduce a new generation to the joy of pounding metal. The smiths who came of age in the back-to-the-land resurgence of the ’70s are the elders now, passing down their skills, books, and tools.

Back in those days, Nol Putnam (his full name is Oliver de Montalant Putnam) was teaching history at a private school in Massachusetts when he came across the book “The Art of Blacksmithing”, by Alex W. Bealer. Thus began a lifelong love affair that would have him in a series of seven smithies over the years, first pounding out fireplace tools that he hawked at craft shows, and eventually creating bespoke iron gates for clients such as the Rockefellers and the Washington National Cathedral. At 87, he still works nearly daily, turning iron into art.

Putnam made a McIntosh apple-sized ball from iron that he salvaged when The Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building, built in the 1890s, was undergoing a renovation in the early 2000s. The construction company was sending the nearly pure iron taken from the roof to a recycling center, where it was being melted down with cars, railroad wheels, and other junk to create construction-grade steel—a tremendous waste.
“That iron is like gold to a certain class of people,” Putnam told the man in charge, so the company gave him—at no cost—five tons of wrought iron bar. In turn, he gave some to the American College of the Building Arts; some to other schools in Maryland and Pennsylvania; and some to Mount Vernon for use in its “living history” demonstration forge. Two decades later, Putnam still has about 1,000 pounds left: “It’s my stash of the good stuff.” *photo by Geoffrey Archer*

Putnam’s White Oak Forge is located up a winding road from the tiny town of Huntly, Va. When he first started out, some five decades ago, he would prop his blacksmithing book open near his self-built forge. He still has that book—along with a hat that shows constellations of pinpricks from flying sparks.
One of Putnam’s recent works is a bench topped with walnut cut and milled in the 1950s from his family’s farm. He hauled the wood from home to home for 70 years, waiting for a project that was worthy. *photo by Raymond Boc*

White Oak is Putnam’s seventh blacksmithing shop, each one more tailored than the last. Skylights let in the sun; a 12-foot ceiling gives him room to manipulate long metal bars without bashing the lights. The floor-to-ceiling chimney creates a Venturi effect that sucks heat and smoke up and out. There’s also a jib crane; a block-and-tackle salvaged from a tugboat that hangs from a beam; and two 300-pound anvils. The forge floor is 4-inch-thick, reinforced concrete. His pneumatic hammer sits on a 4-foot reinforced cube of its own, isolated so that its vibrations won’t crack the floor or rattle the walls.
The heart of his operation is the forge, where Nol Putnam has spent more than half his life. The shop runs cold in winter, but in summer, especially near the 3,000-degree forge, the air inside can hit 130 degrees. None of this bothers Putnam. “I don’t expect comfort in the forge, particularly,” he says. *photo by Raymond Boc*

In Putnam’s shop, much of the initial striking is done by pneumatic hammer—his mechanical apprentice—a machine so brutish it can shape a 2-inch square of steel. Yet, with Putnam’s trained toes on the air pressure level, it is gentle enough to close a matchbox without crushing a corner (one of his favorite tricks).
Putnam tells a story of Kaiser Wilhelm visiting Krupp Industries and marveling at a huge hammer capable of moving tons of metal at a time. “How accurate is it?” Putnam says the Kaiser asked. “The smith had the temerity to ask the Kaiser for his watch. He set it onto the anvil and set his hammer in motion, stopping it just before it touched the crystal.” *photo by Raymond Boc*

When the winter sun spills through the doors of Putnam’s forge, it casts a glow over racks of dusty hammers and iron forms of all kinds.
Putnam says many of his ideas come to him in dreams. “I’ll have some kind of image and as I get more awake, I shift from design to engineering,” he says. “It’s almost as though I take the image and make it 3-D in my head and I’m able to rotate it or tip it so I can see the whole thing. When I wake up all the way I can pick up pencil and paper and go to work.” *photo by Raymond Boc*

Putnam has built many custom gates, including one for a Rockefeller estate. The gates pictured here, welcoming visitors to the garth (garden) at the Reveille United Methodist Church in Richmond, Va., are a memorial to a young woman who was killed in a car accident. The church wouldn’t allow the family to use her initials in the design, so Putnam snuck in curlicued Cs, some forward and some backward, as a nod to her name.
*Original photographic negative by Henry Eastwood*

Putnam is most proud of the gates he made to protect a columbarium within the Washington National Cathedral, which houses the ashes of ambassadors, bishops, and cultural luminaries such as Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. A few years ago, Matthew Shepard’s ashes were placed there, too. Shepard’s family had waited two decades to secure a home for his remains that hateful homophobes couldn’t mar. Putnam says he is honored and grateful to have his gates now protect the boy. *Original photographic negative by Henry Eastwood*

“As a hammer comes from the factory it is naught but a war club,” Putnam writes. The handle is too short, the faces have sharp edges, or the rounded edge on the peen is so sharp that it all but cuts the work. So he holds the head into his fire, then pounds the faces back on themselves, forging the face into a square that will allow him to work into corners, and blunting the peen so that it works like a rolling pin, pushing the iron, not cutting it. *photo by Raymond Boc*

To transform cold iron into something as lifelike and fluid as a leaf, Putnam first takes a pencil-sized bar of pure iron, heating and pushing the molecules against each other to create a flat lozenge. Then, imagining a line down the center, he pounds the metal ever thinner toward the edges. He holds it to the corner of the anvil and whacks it with a sharp peen, driving the edge into space. Many strikes later, the iron looks like it’s fluttering. *photo by Raymond Boc*

In the early ’90s, the National Cathedral’s Canon Clerk of the Works, Richard T. Feller, wanted to add elaborate interior gates to the historical building. So, for a year and a half Putnam worked, pounding out 250 petals and leaves, and imprinting the rivets that would be the flowers’ pistils with individual designs, including a tiny bug and the face of Yoda. He forged the frames to create the ornate Folger Gate and then the Brown Gate, making each fit perfectly in the craftsman-made building, which didn’t always have precisely machined angles. Thirty years later, Putnam is still forging commissions for the Cathedral. *photo by Raymond Boc*

Although his hands are nicked and scarred, his arms sinewy from decades wielding a hammer, Putnam is the first to point out that smithing is not all about strength. With his pneumatic hammer, Putnam can continue forging even as he ages; and women with lesser arm-strength can, too. In recent years, the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C., has been seeing a slight rise in women learning the trade. “The tide is turning,” says ACBA professor Jack Brubaker. In May 2021, Putnam gave the graduation address at the school and donated his 1200-book library. *photo by Raymond Boc*

Wrought iron (top) has less than 0.08 percent carbon and is the most desirable for smithing. When heated, the molecules slide against one another at an angle, pushed by the peen of the smith’s hammer like piecrust in front of a rolling pin. (The best stuff forges “like cold butter,” Putnam says.) Mild steel (third from top)—with 0.1 to 0.2 percent carbon—is the only iron most younger smiths have ever used, and tool steel (bottom) is solid, without fibers. Those who know the difference scrounge for wrought iron, sharing exciting news when an old bridge is being disassembled, or when an anchor or its chain is salvaged from a shipwreck. *photo by Raymond Boc*

Putnam’s wall of bins is full of rivets of all kinds. He bought some in 2009 when the Chrysler car company went bankrupt; some came to him when a friend’s third-generation smithy shut down and the man’s son showed up with a trailer with four tons of rivets, divvied into little plastic bags. The rivets serve both a functional and aesthetic role in the pieces he makes.

A private client who once commissioned a gate from Putnam for his estate also collects the work of designer Edgar Brandt, whose favorite motif was the cobra. When the man hired Putnam to create a pair of 22-inch cobra andirons for a huge fireplace in his office, Putnam named them Kaa and Bagheera, from Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories”, and added a swelling to represent a mouse the snake had swallowed. He brought the finished andirons into his house to await delivery. “My wife saw these life-size cobras,” he says, “and you could hear her scream several counties away.” *Original photographic negative by Henry Eastwood*

Raymond Boc has been interested in photography since the age of 7, when he acquired a Roy Rogers Brownie camera.
Janine Latus is a North Carolina-based writer. Her 2007 memoir, “If I Am Missing or Dead,” has been an international bestseller.