Whole districts — Bromsgrove and the Black Country in England, similar villages across Europe — lived by forging nails by hand at backyard hearths, whole families cutting and heading rod iron for piecework wages that were a byword for poverty. Machine-cut nails, and then cheap wire nails in the late nineteenth century, erased the trade almost completely by 1900; the nailers' cottages, with forge shops behind the kitchen, still stand around Bromsgrove.
Hand nailer no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1500 – 1850
The forge at the economy's centre
Pre-industrial economies ran on wrought iron, and the smith was its retail interface: ships, mills, coaches, farms and armies all ended at somebody's anvil. The trade specialised and stratified — anchor smiths, chainmakers, nailers, farriers, whitesmiths — and master smiths of ornamental iron, like Jean Tijou at St Paul's Cathedral, worked at the level of court artists. In the American colonies the blacksmith was often the first tradesman a new settlement recruited; in the Black Country of England, whole districts forged nothing but nails or chain, a hand industry employing tens of thousands.
What else was happening then
1856
Bessemer makes steel industrial
Henry Bessemer's converter, announced in 1856, blows air through molten iron to make cheap steel by the ton. Combined with rolling mills and drop forges, it moves metalworking decisively from the anvil to the factory: within decades, nails, chain, tools and hardware — the smith's bread and butter — are machine-made.
1908
The Model T empties the smithy
The US census counted well over 200,000 blacksmiths in 1910, most of them shoeing horses and repairing wagons. The automobile removed the horse from working life within a generation, and by mid-century the American village smithy was effectively extinct — a collapse repeated across the industrial world.
Where that work lives now
The trade that made every other trade's tools — from Hittite iron and guild forges to the artist-blacksmiths who brought the anvil back in the twenty-first century.
🔥 Blacksmith →