The Tinsmith
In July, Brookings hosts a festival of arts which attracts more people to this small town than any other single day event. A myriad of booths are set up in one of the public parks where artists sell their wares. This year’s festival had watercolors of grain elevators, sign posts, black and white photos and nature paintings. Skip all of it and proceed to the back where you will find the “living history” section. That’s where you’ll find the tinsmith.
“This stuff,” he says in a practiced tone, “was the Tupperware of its day. People couldn’t get enough of it.”
He demonstrates part of the process for us. He is dressed for the part, although neither Thom nor I can tell whether it’s deliberate. He wears, for example, a leather necklace one with a single large bead on it, similar to the kind a surfer might wear with a shark’s tooth. His vest and trousers are scruffy.
He is a thinker though and it isn’t long before we get in deep conversation. He answers my question about why he does it by saying that it gives him a real, physical clarity for what that time period was, for what the industrial revolution meant.
I asked him how wistful it made him and he’s adamant that choosing to work with tin was just arbitrary; he harbors no particular sentimentality for the substance, the workers, or the time period. It’s from there that we get philosophical.
He explains how America posed different problems during industrialization than Europe: in Europe there was an overabundance of skilled craftsmen and a shortage of resources. In America, there was an overabundance of resources and a real shortage of craftsmen. Hence exodus, but that wasn’t it.
Engineers examined the process these craftsmen went through and started to machine the different steps of their labor. Fairly soon the process of working with tin became automated and the skill and craft of working it by hand were forgotten. Soon after there was a discovery of a new substance (I’ve forgotten whether it was a cheap porcelain or clay) and tin was forgotten. It was old media.
I was surprised that this wasn’t sad for him; he worked with tin now after all and must have some kind of attachment to the process he had spent so much time to reclaim. But he said that these craftsmen had moved from tin at that point. I only half believe him now, as I did then. There must be something more than just a philosophy behind his investment of time. There must be a feel to his tools and the heat as he imposes his will, his structure on the malleable metal.
But as I look at the larger picture I share the tinsmith's optimism. In industrializing England, agitated laborers upset about technology replacing their work went on rampages, destroying machines. It must have been frightening for knitters, weavers, and other skilled workers to see themselves replaced so quickly. It must also have seemed banal that the steps they took so carefully were done in a brusque, mechanic fashion by a machine.
Through the tinsmith’s eye, he sees these craftsmen becoming homesteading farmers that settled the western US, construction workers, gold prospectors, tradesmen, perhaps even cowboys. Some were left behind. However, all of their children woke up to a world that was bigger and brighter. Today we never think of tin; without this blog entry perhaps you would never have spent a moment of your life on its thought. Yet as I watched him hammering away and talking about his craft, I had to see how much the world changed. Contrast.
It’s a very slow version of reading an old newspaper. The world is different but to experience it right we see it from that old perspective.
10:53:06 PM 
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