OSKALOOSA, Iowa (AP) - Twice a month, a local pastor with a passion for glowing metal takes time out of his schedule to teach anyone interested in learning the art of blacksmithing.
College Avenue Friends Church Pastor James Tower freely devotes his time on the second and fourth Saturday of each month to those in search of a new trade or skill set.
Tower has post-traumatic stress disorder and says blacksmithing helps him to manage it. After teaching himself how to build a foundry, just by watching YouTube videos, Tower said he played around with metal casting and decided to take things all the way by getting into blacksmithing.
“It’s very therapeutic to do something kind of mid-level dangerous,” he told The Oskaloosa Herald. “I just really needed to kind of get my mind off things sometimes and (blacksmithing) really helped with that. I wanted to share that with other people, so I came out to Nelson. I spent a lot of my life working with metal professionally and it’s way more fulfilling for me to help a kid make a claw hammer that making somebody a bunch of money.”
Tower walked in Nelson Pioneer Farm and Museum with the hope of meeting someone that could offer him more guidance on the trade, but left with the knowledge that it was time for him to guide others into learning the art. It turned out that Nelson Pioneer Farm was interested in having someone use their blacksmithing shop and even start a blacksmithing club at some point, and this is how Forgiven Forge was birthed.
“It’s been a lot of fun to play out here and trying to fix this place up a little bit,” Tower said. “It’ll be really fun to redo it all for workflow and actually use this stuff, that’s the neat thing. It’ll be neat to see how it was and how everything looked the day that he gave up and retired.”
On the second Saturday of every month from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Tower welcomes a group of interested men and women to his workshop at his home next door to College Avenue Friends Church. There, he leads a brief devotion before using a combination of older and modern techniques to teach the group how to create art out of metal. Tower meets with a group at Nelson Pioneer Farm on the fourth Saturday of every month from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. as well. This time, the groups practice turn of the century methods such as coal-fired forges turned by a hand crank.
Fifteen-year-old Katie Jakes, from Indianola, is a self-taught blacksmith, like Tower. She learned about Forgiven Forges from her mom and decided she had to come out. Jakes said eventually she wants to get more into farming and knowing how to blacksmith would be a very beneficial skill to have.
“I do a lot of heritage crafts and I am hoping to get this one a lot better and do it a lot more,” she said. “I could have done better (today), but it’s also better than anything I’ve done at home.”
Tower corrected her, saying, “You will do better!”
Saturday was Jakes’ first time attending a workshop on blacksmithing. Tower assisted Jakes with making a decorative “S” hook. Tower said her work looked really nice and she did a great job. Working alongside Jakes was Oskaloosa resident Collin Covey. This was Covey’s second workshop, the first time he made a leaf and Saturday he decided to make a knife out of a railroad nail.
Both Jakes and Covey agreed that they learned a lot and they will definitely return to forge some more.
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