Object Lesson: James Anderson Blacksmith Shop, 1986–2011: An Appreciation

March 4, 2011, brought backhoes and demolition contractors to the Anderson Forge and a lump to the throats of architectural historians at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF). Even those of us who were still in school when its reconstruction was completed in 1986 found the episode difficult to witness. Any demolition is a melancholy event, and it was impossible not to be moved by seeing the product of countless hours of research and fieldwork, of endless hewing and pit-sawing of timbers, forging of nails, and riving of clapboards, to say nothing of years of heated meetings at which details of construction and logistics of programming were argued over, all brought crumbling to the ground over the course of one cloudless afternoon (Figure 1).

This was, we assured ourselves, a mercy killing. Some of the blacksmiths said that on a quiet day you could hear the termites crunching away at the soft, fast-grown pine that made up much of the framing material. Following Hurricane Isabel in 2003, much of the clapboard roof had to be covered in canvas to keep the rain out. Where clapboards weren’t re-covered, they had split and twisted enough that, in one room of the shop, more light filtered through the roof than came in through its single, small window. The damage done by wind, water, and vermin was enough to require new, modern wood posts and a long summer beam to be inserted down the length of the shop to keep it from collapsing (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Demolition of the James Anderson Forge (reconstructed 1984–86), Williamsburg, Virginia.

Photograph by Jeffrey E. Klee, March 4, 2011.

Following the demolition of the 1986 shop, the Anderson Forge was replaced by a group of structures that are today known as the Anderson Armoury complex (Figure 3). The reconstructed industrial site includes a tin shop, a kitchen, a workshop, a well head, two small storehouses, and a large new armory, where blacksmiths interpret the work of Revolutionary War–era armorer and Williamsburg’s most active blacksmith, James Anderson. Today, the Anderson Armoury reflects our understanding of the full range of accommodations for work at the site as it evolved by 1779. The latest reconstructions, manifestly different from the modest structure built in 1986, have benefited from twenty-five years of additional research and present a very different view of working life in eighteenth-century Williamsburg. Though Anderson’s new shop better reflects the current thinking of foundation archaeologists, historians, and tradespeople, the old, 1980s shop was a powerful, evocative artifact of the scholarly history of both CWF and the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF).¹

Figure 2.

Interior of the James Anderson Forge (reconstructed 1984–86). The light-colored posts and summer beam immediately behind the forges were inserted to support the failing floor above.

Photograph by Jeffrey E. Klee, April 2004.

I first saw the old Anderson Forge in May 2003, when it was open for tours at the annual VAF conference, held that year in Williamsburg. After proceeding from the Governor’s Palace past dozens of relatively modest but handsome and well-kept wooden houses, all resplendent in beaded weatherboards, modillion cornices, and other Georgian finery, encountering the Anderson shop on Duke of Gloucester Street was a revelation. Entrance was through its north gable end, which was a rough wall of tarred, wavy clapboards with just a small, shuttered window and a board-and-batten door in it (Figure 4).

As we were told, its foundations were uncovered by James Knight in 1932 and then, using more refined methods of excavation, again by Ivor Noël Hume and Robert Foss in 1975.² Foss and Noël Hume believed that the shop had evolved in four major phases, beginning with a twenty-foot-by-twenty-six-foot section, served by a single forge and thought to be Anderson’s private shop. As they understood the remains, this was expanded hurriedly during the Revolution, with an eighteen-foot-long extension to the north...