Blacksmith Glen B. Wesley

Working on His 3rd Career

 

After 22 years in the U.S. Airforce and a second career in country club management, which included seven years as general manager of the Country Club of Louisiana, Glen Wesley of Highland Lakes Subdivision picked up his father’s old blacksmithing tools and went to work.  

 

“My dad was a blacksmith until I was four or five years old and then he closed his shop and went into another line of work,” he said.   “We had all his old equipment stored away, so after about 50 years I began to learn how to use the stuff.”

 

Wesley said he was always interested in blacksmithing, but it was a weekend seminar at the LSU Rural Life Museum 11 years ago that provided the push he needed to get into the business of pounding and bending iron into useful shapes.   “I joined the Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association and similar associations in Mississippi and Alabama,” he said.

 

He also attended the Campbell School in North Carolina and the Ozark School of Blacksmithing in Missouri.   That’s where he learned the old traditional methods of joinery.   “It’s the way they did things 200 years ago in a charcoal fired forge,” he explained.   “Vern Patin is a bricklayer who lives on Kenilworth Parkway, and he is who I hired to build the charcoal-fired forge in my shop.”

 

Patin did a super job according to Wesley.   He said the forge works very well as he began demonstrating on a nearby anvil.   “I actually do anywhere from 18 to 20 demonstrations each year at the various plantations such as San Francisco and Houmas House,” he said between ringing hammer blows as he began working a glowing iron rod into a flattened piece that could have been part of a hinge, an easel or any of hundreds of useful things made of iron or steel.  

 

The charcoal to fuel the forge comes from West Virginia and a fellow member of the local blacksmithing association brings it in by the truckload.   “He makes it available to his fellow smiths,” explained Wesley.   The forge can actually heat metal up to 3,000 degrees and beyond.   “But you don’t want to get iron or steel that hot because you just burn the carbon out and you wind up with nothing.”

 

Blacksmiths work in darkened shops because they must see the color of the metal in the forge to tell its temperature.   The range is from red to yellow and then white hot.   

“Steel works at around 2000 degrees,” explained Wesley.   “It is white hot at 2500 degrees.”  

Doing demonstrations in the sunlight can be quite challenging because the smith has trouble seeing the color of the heated material and it is hard for him to know where he is temperature-wise.

 

“We actually sell a lot of the stuff I make,” explained Wesley.   “We have contractors who order from us on a regular basis.”   One client is the Circa1857 antique store on Government Street.   And Wesley’s work is sold at the Baton Rouge Arts Market at Fifth and Main in the old Downtown area on the first Saturday every month.

 

Wesley also makes all of the easels for the series of large John Folse cook books that are currently very popular and on display all around town.

 

“Of course people think of blacksmiths as making a lot of horse shoes, but I never got into shoeing horses,” said Wesley.   “Being a farrier is a whole other business.”

 

But when Laura Plantation in Vacherie had to be rebuilt following a fire, Wesley’s talent was put to the test.   He provided all of the ironwork that had to be redone to match things made by blacksmiths 200 years ago.   “A lot of what I did at Laura, got covered up in the reconstruction process, but it was important that everything be as authentically reproduced as possible and that is where I came in.”

 

The annual Fall Pilgrimage is another place where you might run into Glen Wesley demonstrating his relatively new profession.   He said he feels it is important to perpetuate the craft.   “Some of the little boys will come back ten or 15 times while I am working,” he said.   “Those are the ones who we might be able to get interested.”   Among his three daughters and five grandchildren there is one young man Wesley has his eye on as a possible student of the art of blacksmithing, but he said it is a little too early to tell.

 

Wesley did a lot of fences and gates earlier in his career, but he said that can get to be very pretty heavy work and he needs help to do most of it.   Also people wanted him to actually install what he made, so he is not pursuing that any longer.   Mention of fences and gates, however, brought up the tremendous job of rebuilding the old fence around the Old State Capitol and the fact that after needing to be extensively repaired for many years the project was actually completed last year.  

 

“Well, that certainly was an enormous job, but the parts of the fence around the Old State Capitol were all molded and then assembled.   Nothing was forged, so there was actually no need for a blacksmith on that job,” he explained.  

 

Oh, right…well…I guess there is a lot to learn about the art of blacksmithing.