Fire and an explosion destroyed farrier Jim Quick's workshop in Niwot, Colorado on Sunday, June 5, 2011. This is all that remained. (Jim Quick photo)
Jim Quick is a lucky man. He has a good sense of timing, too.
He took a break from working on some tools Sunday morning. The well-known farrier clinician and competitor left his farrier shop in Niwot, Colorado to step onto his patio and speak to a neighbor for a few minutes. It would be the last time he'd set foot in that shop.
Jim Quick will still compete at Calgary
Jim said, "I was running the power hammer and using a gas forge" before he shut everything off to speak to the neighbor. "We walked up to the house to sit on the patio when we heard a boom..." he continued. The blast was said to have sent a gas tank flying 100 yards in the air before it landed in a field.
According to a passerby quoted on Denver's Channel 7 ABC-TV local news, the shop caught fire and then exploded, eventually leaving behind just a few hulking metal skeletons.
Jim was mourning the loss of some of his favorite tools today, many of which were made for him or were gifts from great farriers and friends, living and dead, from all over the world. His Kohlswa anvil and some hammers survived the explosion and his shoeing truck was not damaged.
"The Practice Palace is gone," Jim Quick wrote on Monday after fire and an explosion destroyed his shop.(photo provided by Jim Quick)
"The Practice Palace is gone," he wrote on Monday. But even without most of his beloved special tools, he plans to keep practicing.
Looking at the calendar, it's easy math to see that Jim Quick has exactly 30 days left to practice for the Calgary Stampede World Championship Blacksmiths' Competition in Canada next month. He's promised he won't let his teammates down. I told him Monday night that he may be practicing under the stars, so it had better not rain for the next month.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
This horse is headed down the shaft of a coal mine in France, date unknown. (Wikimedia image)
If you are anything like me, you've been riveted to the news this week, and your emotions have run the gamut as hopes have risen and fallen so many times in the race to reach the miners trapped in the West Virginia coal mine.
This video shows you some of the last employed pit ponies in Britain; the voice is poet John Stafford, who eulogizes a pony named Dot. Dot was one of the last pit ponies to work at Annesley Colliery in Nottinghamshire, England.
Thinking about coal mines made me remember about the use of ponies, horses and mules deep below the ground in mines in North America, Australia and Europe. Perhaps they were used in other parts of the world, as well.
Horses and ponies weren't used much, if at all, in mines in the British Isles until 1842, when an Act of Parliament outlawed women and children under the age of ten from working in coal mines. Up until then, it had been women and children who lugged or dragged the coal out of the mines.
"Pit ponies" are most famous for being used in the British mines, where as many as 70,000 were underground at the height of horse-powered coal mine production in 1913. Larger horses were popular for underground work in Germany and mules were preferred in the United States
The pit ponies wore leather shields over their faces, like a solid bridle shield. Bare wires could cause sparks if a pony bumped into one. One statistic said that the ponies were not blind, as most people thought they would be from living in the dark, but a large percentage had lost at least one eye from accidents. In photos, you will notice that the pit ponies had their tails shaved, and probably their manes as well.
These tandem-hitched heavy horses aren't pit ponies, but they are pulling a load of feed for the ponies stranded during a coal strike in England. Do you think they made it through that mud? Double-click to view full size. (Libray of Congress image)
Pit ponies in Britain were one of the first really big public animal welfare campaigns. The RSPCA was concerned about the ponies, and campaigned so that ponies couldn't work more than 48 hours a week. But most of the companies took very good care of them. Many people said they took better care of the ponies than they did the miners. Good pit ponies were valuable and important to the success of the operation. But the public campaigned until finally the last pony kept underground was brought up to the surface in the 1980s.
A1908 image from the Library of Congress shows us mules in a Pennsylvania coal mine. They wore ear hoods to prevent them from being shocked by low-hanging wires. No doubt, they learned to walk with their heads low. This was before there were any child labor laws in the United States. Notice that three of these young miners have whips around their necks.
In the United States, mules were preferred in the mines, and some quite big draft mules went down the shafts and stayed there, sometimes for a year at a time. Mules were especially popular in Pennsylvania. Before US child labor laws were passed, most of the miners are boys who could get into smaller spaces.
This horse was being shod by two young colliery farriers in Wales. Notice the horse is wearing a hood. His tail isn't shaved as is often seen in old photos, but his mane is roached.
The collieries in Great Britain employed farriers. They repaired equipment, made chains and spent a lot of time sharpening the pick axes of the miners. One reports states that each miner took pride in his ax and would take it to the forge to be sharpened in a particular way that suited his way of picking at the mine face. Farriers understood how to please each miner. The farriers also made shoes for the ponies.
When their work in the forge was done each day, the farriers went down the mine and shod the ponies as they finished a shift, or the ponies from another shift before they started. Ponies weren't allowed to work if they had a shoe off, so the farrier's visit was important. Every foot on every pony had to be lifted and looked at every day.
Sign courtesy of Mining Culture Educational and Research Network
This was a long, long day for a farrier. There was no light in the underground stables except for miner's lamps. The farrier would take the vessel out of his lamp and put it on his tool box, like a candle. He would have been trimming and shoeing almost by touch.
Yes, there were hoof boots long ago. This one is from a mine in the Lake District in Cumbria, England, near the Scottish border. The sole of the boot is studded with copper rivets. You can see it at the Keswick Mining Museum.
In coal mines and around explosives factories, horses were shod with copper alloy or "brass" (copper and zinc alloy) shoes and special brass nails made by Capewell Horse Nails and perhaps other companies. Brass didn't cause sparks the way that steel did. Perhaps that is also why horse amulets, called "brasses" are always made of brass.
All the shoeing below ground was done cold, of course, in spite of all the available coal. Any spark could ignite a fire or, worse yet, an explosion, because of gasses and dust in the air.
You've probably heard about canaries being kept in mines, or even being sent in ahead of the men. A canary would die from the gas long before a man or a mule or a pony, and they served as a warning of the danger in the air.
Welsh miners lamps are especially interesting. Today, they're popular on wooden boats. They have a distinctive tall chimney and usually come with a hook at the top. Once British farrier Grant Moon, who competed under the Welsh flag, brought one of the USA as a special award, and told us about how the mine's name and mark were engraved into the chimney. They are special.
The miner's lamp did a lot more than light the way through the mine. The color and height of the flame in the lamp was a means of constant feedback to the miner about the gases present in the air below ground. They were known as "safety lamps". They are small and you might overlook them. But a miner wouldn't.
Many years ago I met a lovely gentleman from Yorkshire, England named Eric Plant, FWCF. He had worked as a farrier at a colliery and he was the first person who told me about pit ponies; I had no idea that as many as 70,000 ponies were working in Great Britain's mines in the early 1900s. Later in life he was the farrier for the magnificent Tetley Shires, the showcase team for Tetley Brewery in Leeds, England.
Mr. Plant painstakingly photocopied all his booklets about pit ponies and the welfare movement to protect them and sent them to me. I always wanted to tape his stories, but I didn't have the privilege of seeing him again before he died. Most of the little facts about ponies and mining in this blog post came from my very precious file of Mr. Plant's own memorabilia.
The wrath of Hephaestus Himself seems to be spewing from this Damascus forge put to its test at yesterday's Handmade Horseshoes farrier competition in Leighton Buzzard, England. Photographer Gary Huston has mounted a wonderful photo recording of the day on his Flickr photo gallery.
Gary is a terrific farrier/photographer who knows where to point the camera and experiments with color saturation for unusual and remarkable effects. I'm a big fan of his and I bet you will be, too!
I just hope his Canon didn't melt...
For any non-farrier readers: this contraption is a propane forge used by farriers to heat steel for shoemaking or reshaping/altering of existing shoes. It works much like your gas grill but heats the steel quickly and efficiently to a very high heat so the steel is malleable.
Working with one of these all day may be why farriers are such good hands at summer barbecues...and many of them are also great chefs, possibly because they have an innate understanding of the effects of heat on matter. Think about it.
At this competition, farriers working in teams or alone would have been competing for perfection in craftmanship of a prescribed shoe design in a particular dimension from a supplied length, width and thickness of raw steel material. Think: Iron Chef with hammer and tongs. Realize: Hephestus lives, and he lives well.
