I WAS FOR MANY YEARS a (leading) model for the internationally-acclaimed "Western" artist... Paul Calle. (Further details of our relationship and our many adventures together, are given in my Mountainman Section of this Website, which also contains links to Paul's prowess as onetime NASA Space artist ("One Giant Step for Mankind") and websites and galleries selling or featuring his work...). And once he painted me in my log cabin smithy for a period depiction of an early Frontier Smith (above).

This cabin was my first smithy, and built of logs I cut in the woods and assembled on the banks of a nameless pond on Boone Creek behind our place at Wilton, CT. Later I disassembled the cabin and reassembled it again (thus having built one cabin two times!), at our new place up on Redding Ridge some miles north. I hauled the logs into place mostly alone and working with my (very!) fractious old mare, Missy – skidding them through the snow on brisk winter days. I forged an oldtime froe for myself (the ancient tool for making shakes from billets of wood) and made all my oldtime handhewn shakes for my cabin...and moreover laid them "... to the wind" along the ridgeline as did my grandfather and our forebears before us – and which detail you may ascertain in some of the accompanying photos. I had never done this before, but I remembered well my grandfather telling me how he did same as a young man, and so that was my motivation. (The way you use a froe, by the way, twisting it back and forth, is where our old saying "to and fro" comes from...).

I then adzed-out heavy planks for a door, which I put together with hand-forged nails, "deadening" them as the old English and Mountain people had it, by bending them over inside. (Ever hear of something "dead as a doornail"?). They did this so bears, and boogers, and Injuns and other undesireables could not rip the planks off from the outside... My door was hung on leather-strap hinges and had a big dropbar and appropriate forged latch on the inside, complete to latchstring – which I left ever "out" as the ringing of an anvil is guaranteed to draw visitors, as every blacksmith knows...


I paved the floor with worn and broken secondhand brick I carted in from an abandoned building project, and for several years this was my "oldtime forge" setup. Later, I built a barn closer to the house and enclosed the back side equipment shed as a new and improved smithy. My (very) amateurish watercolor of this (I am certainly no Calle!) appears here.