Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 22, 1993 TAG: 9311220057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Historic Fincastle Inc., which already had built the smithy shop behind the Wysong Museum, was eager for someone to come in and work it.
Once Harman moved in, people stopped by to meet the town's latest tourist attraction. A few ordered hinges and candlesticks.
"I was kinda like a new puppy for a while," Harman says. "Everybody wanted to come in and pet the puppy. Then the puppy started growing up and nobody came around anymore."
Harman says he soon learned he couldn't earn a living running the blacksmith shop. Now he is closing it, little more than three months after he opened for business.
The paying jobs he expected simply never came in on a consistent basis, he says.
"I had a tremendous number of people who would come in and watch me work," he said. "But they never really had anything that they wanted or needed from me."
Dottie Kessler, president of Historic Fincastle Inc., said the nonprofit group will start advertising for another blacksmith soon. "We would dearly love to have somebody in there," Kessler said. "We'd even take a part-time person."
It will be a challenge to find somebody. There aren't many working blacksmiths anymore, and Historic Fincastle wants a blacksmith who does ornamental work, as opposed to shoeing horses. "It's going to take some time to build up a clientele," Kessler said.
Harman said he simply couldn't wait any longer. This has been a tough year for him.
Harman's love for blacksmithing started a few years ago after he began dabbling in medieval armor.
Early this year, he realized his dream of opening a blacksmith's shop. He opened one in Elliston to make armor for collectors and historical reenactments. Then in May that shop was destroyed by a motorist whose car ran off the road and crashed into it.
For a while, to make ends meet, he worked at a drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant.
Then Harman heard about the opportunity in Fincastle. Historic Fincastle Inc. started building the shop more than two years ago. It had a blacksmith, Dale Morse, lined up. But the project slowed because of a lack of money and Morse said he couldn't wait any longer.
The building finally was finished this summer. Harman moved in the first of August with great expectations. He invested $5,000 in equipment and improvements.
But he says the income from the business was pitiful, perhaps $200 or $300 a month.
One problem, he says, was that it was difficult to get customers to understand how much work he put into each item - and how that had to translate into a price that was higher than what they'd pay for something stamped out of a factory machine.
In many cases, he reduced his price to the point it barely covered the materials, much less his time.
Now he is planning to move to Radford, where he will set up a small shop in the basement of his new home. Instead of local walk-in business, he'll go back to making replicas of armor from the 14th through 19th centuries.
He'll be starting from scratch. He lost much of his original investment in the Fincastle shop, and has had to dip into his savings to make ends meet.
Still, Harman says, in the short time he was in Fincastle he got a lot of satisfaction from the work he did for his handful of loyal customers. "The look on their faces when they picked up their order - that was worth much more than the price they paid."
by CNB