In honour of Labour Day, today I’m featuring a poem about work. Perhaps – since this is an American poem – I should say, in honor of Labor Day, today I am featuring a poem about work.

You may be familiar with the opening lines of “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

Find the full text here (including printable version and 1890 illustrated edition).

The Original Manuscript

“The Village Blacksmith” was first published in Knickerbocker magazine in November 1840. It appeared in a book of Longfellow’s collected poems the following year.

The Library of Congress: American Memory record for the document states:

“This manuscript was donated to the Library of Congress in 1942 by collector Francis Joseph Hogan (1877-1944), a Washington, D.C., attorney. It is written in ink on two sides of one sheet, with the last stanza appearing on a segment of an additional sheet which had been lengthened to match the first, probably before donation. A Library of Congress conservator has identified the paper as wove cotton or linen, machine-made, by Ames Paper Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, whose embossing appears in the upper-left corner of both sheets.”

The Original Blacksmith?

In my research I came across two candidates for the blacksmith who inspired the poem. The first is Dexter Pratt, who lived and worked near Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wikipedia backs this man, citing Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

 However, in an obituary of April 7, 1910, The Daily Times calls Thaddeus W. Tyler the “original smithy.” (We’ll have to ignore the fact that the smithy was the building, while the man was called the smith.)

The Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association also states that Tyler was the inspiration behind the poem and provides a link to his obituary (this one from the Boulder Daily Herald).

So who was the real “village blacksmith”?

In this debate I’ll have to side with Wikipedia because the Daily Herald obituary says that Tyler didn’t move to Massachusetts until 1844, four years after the poem was published. Moreover, another source (a record in the archives of the Maine Historical Society) calls Tyler “the apprentice of the ‘Village Blacksmith.’” Mystery solved.

The Original Tree

The “spreading chestnut tree” was also inspired by a real tree, which was cut down years later. On his 72^nd birthday local children presented Longfellow with an armchair made of its wood. He then wrote them a poem, “From My Arm-Chair.” 

A Final Illustration

Sources:
The Cambridge Historical Society
Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by the Maine Historical Society
The Library of Congress: American Memory

(Featured Image: “The Village Blacksmith” by Currier & Ives, 1968 via Amazon)