A true Yankee and a worthy friend: Remembering blacksmith James Ellis
“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smitty 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.”
So goes the opening stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s well-known poem, written in 1840, The Village Blacksmith. My mother used to read it to me from a children’s literature book. But I never met a blacksmith until I moved to Cape Cod in the early 1980s.
Any longtime Barnstable Village resident worth their salt will know instantly who I am writing about, blacksmith James Ellis, who could have been the model for Longfellow’s poem. Ellis traces his family’s history in this time-honored craft back over 100 years.
My first meeting with him was a trip back in time. In a weathered old building, hard beside the salt marsh, he plied his trade over a coal-fired hearth with a hand-cranked bellows contraption. A well-worn hammer flattened the end of an iron rod as he coaxed and twisted it like molten glass. If I remember correctly, I had stopped by to talk about and photograph eel spears which had been made in the shop for years. The pronged ends razor sharp and used by fishermen in the winter to spear eels, another lost art.
His shop was a five-minute walk from my house and on a slow news day I would stop by, occasionally for a photo, but often with a question. Cars, boats, broken shovel heads, Jim could fix just about everything. He and wife Joan were called the unofficial “mayors” of the village. James and Mercy Otis Warren look down from their perch in front of Barnstable Superior Courthouse straight across the street to the Ellis front porch, where just as much history was stored in memories and old photo binders at the Ellis homestead.
Come winter, every time I headed out to cover a blizzard there was always a photo I could count on, Jim, storm proofed in an old pair of tan insulated coveralls, on his lawn tractor, rigged with a snow plow, flashing lights and a horn, keeping up with the weather, plowing the sidewalks, no matter how bad, a true old Yankee not afraid to go out in a storm and help others.
Jim passed away last week at the age of 84, leaving his fellow villagers with a wonderful legacy of memories and a blacksmithing tradition that will live on for years to come in the work of his apprentices.
As Longfellow ended his poem, “Thanks, Thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lessons thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life our fortunes must be wrought.”
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Remembering James Ellis, blacksmith in Barnstable Village
