The Finer Forge
Eton Jones’s simple blacksmith forge
was situated in the Pittstown fort
where Diah Munson owned Lot Number 5.
The shop was dark and reeked of molten iron,
coal dust, quenching metal, copious sweat.
Though mainly sought out as a farrier,
Eton Jones, a Patriot at heart,
in bold defiance of the British law,
produced the township settlers’ scythes and spades,
their axes, wheel rims, cowbells, pots and pans.
Jones was a buoyant, easygoing man
whose raucous singing often could be heard
above the cadenced clanging of the hammer
and the relentless breathing of the bellows.
He never pressed a customer for pay,
and often bartered horseshoes for a sack
of cornmeal, chestnuts or a beaver tail.
This vexed his solid, levelheaded wife,
Rebecca, who equated industry
with reckonings in shillings, pence and pounds.
And there was money to be made each spring—
shad season on the Susquehanna River,
a time when Eton Jones and Diah Munson
would drag a seine in tandem on its banks.
In May of ’78, when they had netted
thirty barrels of the spawning fish,
their cheerfulness at such a bounteous catch
was overshadowed by disturbing news
of raids and disappearances upriver
and sightings of the Tories at Tioga.
The chapter title The Finer Forge comes from this poem:
Least Village boasts its Blacksmith—
Whose Anvil’s even ring
Stands symbol for the finer
Forge
That soundless tugs—within—
~Emily Dickinson, from “Do you see a Soul at the White Heat?”
COMING SOON: PART THREE, CHAPTER TWO
