Grandpa Was a Blacksmith

A really cool thing that happened when I wrote down my known family names for that infamous history project was how it made me feel. I could claim ownership of these names.  Not in a selfish, my-power-is-beyond-your-understanding kind of way, but in a way that felt reassuring.  They were family:  I belonged to them, and they belonged to me.  

Of course, I knew next to nothing about the history of these people.  I “knew” my dad’s family because of our annual visits to see Grandma and Grandpa in Arkansas.  What I knew of his family was that they were full of hugs and southern charm, that they loved Grandma’s biscuits and each other, and that it seemed like pretty much everybody lived there.  Had they always lived there?  I didn’t know.  Where did the Keener family come from? I really did not know. That simple little homework assignment shined a broad beam of light at a hitherto unexplored corner of my life.  

When it came right down to it, the only thing I knew for sure about my extended family was that Grandpa was a blacksmith.  And that particular point of family pride was a very valuable nugget to own.

Case in point:  Back in the early 1980s, if the subject of what our grandfathers did for a living ever came up on the playground, I usually held the trump card among my friends.  My grandpa was a blacksmith. Oh, and he was the oldest living blacksmith in the State of Arkansas.  Short of saying that your grandfather was Ronald Reagan, I couldn’t think of anything cooler than that.

Grandpa had been a blacksmith since age 11. I don’t know about you, but when I was 11, I was listening to Duran Duran on cassette in my new walkman.  I went to dance lessons and Girl Scout meetings after school.  I bowled in a youth league on the weekend.  I had roller skating birthday parties.  Although I was also raised in a rural farming community, my childhood could not have been more different from that of John Gentry Keener, born 73 years before me and 500 miles away in northwest Arkansas.

The late Gentry Keener (Grandpa) was born on March 24, 1900.  He claimed that he was born in Montgomery County and that his family moved to Yell County, Arkansas, when he was 11-months-old. Not to contradict my grandpa, but I found him living with his parents (Henderson Monroe Keener (1870-1941) and Nancy Addie Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (1871-1940)) and three older sisters in Chickalah, Yell County, Arkansas, in the U.S. Census taken just three months after he was born, in June 1900.  

The Keeners farmed, as did all their neighbors.  Grandpa was the only male child out of seven children born to Monroe and Addie Keener, and that fact alone, ladies and gents, is why I believe Grandpa when he says that he started blacksmithing as a kid.  Imagine life in the Ozarks in the early 1900s for a young boy sandwiched in the middle of six sisters.  No wonder he was drawn down the mountain to the little town of Danville, where Grandpa estimated there were no fewer than seven blacksmith shops in business when he was a boy.  What fun it must have been for a young kid to “hang out” in a shop messing with fire and metal until he made something!

Step away from your modern sensibilities for a minute and think about what the blacksmith shop was for a community before the age of complete mechanization.  The blacksmith constructed and repaired farming implements, shoed horses (before cars, how else did people get themselves and their belongings around), and made items for household use, such as kettles, utensils, and sewing tools. With his familiarity with horses, a blacksmith was often called upon to be the town veterinarian.  In a rural community without easy access to a dentist, if you needed a tooth pulled, you might call upon the nearest person with pliers, the blacksmith, for help.  The blacksmith’s shop was the local hardware store and mechanic’s garage, and in a pinch, veterinarian/dentist’s office.  I’ve read in more than a few articles on blacksmithing that a town might survive without a doctor, but it needed its smithy.

There were eight blacksmiths living in Danville, Arkansas, according to the federal census record of 1900.  By 1910, that number had decreased to five residing in Danville, but the total number of blacksmiths in Yell County was 36 (again, per federal census records).  I find it interesting that Grandpa’s occupation is never listed as “blacksmith” in the U.S. census records of 1920, 1930, and 1940.  He is listed as a farmer. Grandpa’s 1918 WWI draft card cites his occupation as “farmer,” too.   

Grandpa was a farmer, too. (Gentry Keener, ca. 1916)

Grandpa married Nomia Esther Barnett (Grandma) on October 20, 1920.  Esther, as Grandma was known, was a local girl, born in Yell County, AR, on June 27, 1905, to Thomas J. Barnett (born about 1863 and died about 1913) and Sallie Ann Brewer (1872-1937).  Gentry and Esther would be married for more than 70 years, and would together raise eight children:  Thomas Lester (1922-1979); Manuel Eloy (1927-1998); Lonnie Henderson (1929-1989); Esther Faye Eloshia (1932-1973); Melba Lamone (born 1936); Troy James (1937-2010); Evie Ann (1940-2010); and Mary Jane (born 1941).

Having to support eight children and a wife, Grandpa worked.  A lot.  His heart may have been with blacksmithing, but he perfected a number of skills to put food on the table, including farming, hunting, hewing ties for the railroad, cutting logs, and building chimneys.  He became an expert in the use of dynamite for blasting, according to the local newspapers, and Grandpa hand hewed sills for houses. Hand hewed.  I can barely manage to cut a straight line with scissors helping my kindergartener with a school project.  

In 1941, when Grandpa’s WWII draft card was filed, he is described as self-employed with his place of business in Danville.  According to a 1978 interview with the Daily Courier-Democrat, during the war, Grandpa worked in Oscar Thacker’s blacksmith shop before moving on to Carl Square Lumber Company for a time.  After this business closed, Grandpa worked for Walter Bench, who he eventually bought out in 1952.  [Note: I couldn’t find a Walter Bench living in Yell County in the 1940 census record.  It could be that he lived elsewhere at that time, was listed by a different name, or even that the newspaper misprinted the name.  Perhaps it was Binch? Or Bunch?  I checked with my 1C1R, Jeremy Smith, who is a bit of an expert on Grandpa, to see if he knew about Mr. Bench and will follow up later.] Six years later, Grandpa moved his shop to the outskirts of town, and this is where he worked until he couldn’t anymore.

Gentry Keener, in front of his shop on Hwy. 10 outside of Danville, AR

I visited Grandpa’s shop a time or two.  I liked that there was always a cat hanging around.  As the child of a truck driver with his own “shop” (i.e., place to collect massive amounts of tools, random pieces of junk, and a plentiful supply of grease rags and old phone books), I was used to being around dangerous, dirty metal things, so I confess that I didn’t beg to go see Grandpa at his shop every visit.  I preferred the company of Grandma at home in her sunny sitting area next to the window overlooking the front yard and drive, where a new relative was sure to stop by for a visit every half hour, and during the lulls when no one happened to be there and Grandma wasn’t chatting on the telephone, the hundreds of framed family photos adorning the walls and shelves kept us company.  

For every two or three sentences Grandpa uttered, Grandma, bless her heart, said hundreds.  But I did have a very special conversation with Grandpa once.  

On a visit in 1988, I brought my tape recorder and joined him on the front porch's wooden rocking chairs, where Grandpa proceeded to answer every question I could think of about a life lived from the start of the 20th Century until that point (a time best remembered for the collapse of the Soviet Union, a presidential election year, and a year of Summer and Winter Olympic games -- remember when Greg Louganis hit his head on the diving board?? Ouch!).  Yours truly was a cheerleader and passionate Guns ‘n’ Roses fan, but I remember being genuinely excited that Grandpa would spend some time talking with me, his youngest grandchild (although he probably didn’t remember exactly where I fit in among the 28 grandchildren he had).  

To my eternal despair, on the ride home back to Kansas with my dad, our car’s cassette tape player ate the tape with my grandpa’s voice on it. Fortunately for all of us, Grandpa was interviewed many times.  He was actually quite the local celebrity.

I think when it became generally known that Grandpa’s blacksmith shop was one of only a handful still operating in the United States (in Grandpa’s obituary published on May 22, 1991, the Yell County Record cited a government survey taken in 1970 that enumerated only 11 public blacksmith shops open for business in the United States, which number by 1980 had shrunk to only two open fulltime - Grandpa’s and one in Oklahoma), Grandpa became an attraction for local Boy Scout troops who could come see how an authentic blacksmith worked.  These visits usually made the local newspaper.

Used with permission of the Yell County Record; photo credit: David Fisher

In 1985, a clever piece on Grandpa entitled, “The Smithy,”was published in Arkansas Magazine, an insert to the Sunday edition of the Arkansas Democrat.  In it, writer and interviewer Tom Kazas (along with photographer Don Marquis) captures the spirit and vitality of a man who never quit doing the work he loved (with the exception of shoeing horses, which became too difficult after an injury to Grandpa’s leg in 1971).

As an old-timer in Danville, Grandpa had seen and heard a lot, so it isn’t surprising to find mention of him in Austin Hamer’s “History of the Log House on Peeler Gap Road.”  Apparently, Davy Crockett had stopped overnight in a log house in Danville on his way to San Antonio, TX, in 1834-35, and Grandpa, “the 90-year-old blacksmith who has a shop just across the road from the lower pasture” confirmed for Mr. Hamer that he had heard this story as a child, and had, indeed, thought the log house was “really old” even when he was a child.

People came to Grandpa for advice, too.  He had “some reputation as a weather forecaster” (see Courier-Democrat, December 24, 1986 edition) and he was asked multiple times about his secret for living so long and staying healthy.  To a reporter for the Yell County Record in December 1980, Grandpa said:

“I really don’t have one.  I eat what I want, sleep when I get ready.  I don’t wear glasses, even for reading and have worked outdoors all of my life.”

In 1978, Grandpa told a Russellville reporter that he ate a lemon each day to ease his arthritis pains.

My personal favorite is that Grandpa was considered an expert water witcher.  His talent for this was documented in “Garden Sass:  A Catalog of Arkansas Folkways,” by Nancy McDonough.  Published in 1975, it’s a collection of stories, recipes, advice, games, songs, photographs, and more that the author gathered about the people she met and places she visited on her tour of the Arkansas countryside.  It's a fascinating read, with great photos.  It makes me think of the Alvin Maker series written by Orson Scott Card, which is populated with characters who have special gifts to do things,such as water-witching and, oh yeah, blacksmithing. (If you like history and fantasy, I recommend these books!) Our country’s history and culture are steeped in folk traditions (do you think General Mills invented the idea of a fruit roll-up?), and Grandpa lived in a time when people still kept to these ways.   Anyway, his water-witching abilities located the spot for a man to dig a 72-foot water well!

By all accounts, Grandpa enjoyed the life of a hard-working country pioneer: hunting (he sold the hides of mink, possums, coons, and pole cats), fishing, and farming; but, it is clear that his first love and passion was always blacksmithing.  He not only made it a trade he could rely on for more than 80 years, but he also made it his art.

Photo used with permission of the Yell County Record

Immediately following my high school graduation, my mom and I (my dad had died in 1989) set out on the 12-hour trek to Danville, Arkansas, to say goodbye to the man who had seen more in his lifetime than anyone else I knew.  This particular chapter in my family’s history had closed.  John Gentry Keener had put down his earthly hammer for the final time on May 18, 1991.  

Grandpa told me on that day in 1988 that he always tried to do his best, whether it was shoeing horses, repairing tools, or picking cotton to put money in his pocket to buy the 35-acre farm he and Grandma called home.  He had lost both thumbs in work-related accidents and had lamed himself in a fall out of a truck bed at the age of 71.  He had survived storms, drought, and the Great Depression. Grandpa had watched two World Wars unfold, not to mention Korea and Vietnam.  He had witnessed major civil rights milestones, been a young man during Prohibition and women's suffrage, and moved along with society as it gradually turned away from self-reliance and tradition to its current passion for technology and convenience.  Yet, Grandpa made jokes and smiled easily, seemingly unburdened by nearly a century of change and turmoil as he looked forward to the next morning when he would get up and go to his shop.  He truly was a man for the ages.  Grandpa was a blacksmith.