Meet the 89-year-old blacksmith keeping the craft alive

MARCELIN, SASK. — Pop’s Old Forge is the kind of place that feels familiar, even if you’ve never been there before.

It’s like a grandfather’s workshop, where nothing is thrown out and everything has a place, even if only he knows where that is. Tools line the walls and crowd the benches, worn smooth from years of use. Pieces of iron sit waiting, mid-thought.

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At 89 years old, Hubert Smith still spends his days here. Not because he has to, but because he doesn’t know how not to.

Hubert Smith laughed when asked about retirement. He said he has no plans to slow down. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Smith didn’t set out to become a blacksmith, but the pull toward the trade seems to have been passed down through the family.

“Dad knew how to blacksmith,” he recalled. “I don’t really remember him blacksmithing, other than I used to turn the crank on the blower.”

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Years passed before Smith stepped back into the fire in a deliberate way. In January of 1994, he took an introductory blacksmithing course at the Western Development Museum.

It didn’t take long for him to understand what he had been missing.

“What you can do with an ordinary, plain piece of iron heated up and a hammer and an anvil is absolutely amazing,” he marveled.

The forge is the heart of any blacksmith’s shop. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

To Smith, fire and iron were never just tools. They were possibilities.

“I tell kids when I do school demonstrations, they’ve all played with Play-Doh. Well, this is my Play-Doh,” he said with a smile.

“When it’s red hot, it’s soft, but you can’t touch it. And you can do almost whatever your mind tells you with that piece of iron.”

Smith recently created t his work of art in honour of a friend. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Over the years, the forge became more than a workspace. It became a kind of gathering place — especially during hammer-ins, large gatherings of blacksmiths coming together around the heat of the fire.

And always, there were the children.

“Two of those little guys were standing there watching two guys work at this forge, and they were just absolutely frozen there, watching this,” Smith recalled. “They couldn’t turn their eyes away from it.”

He said he could see their interest sparking, just like the iron on the forge.

“When you get this in a child when they’re that small, that’s going to stay there,” he said. “They’re going to be our students just down the road.”

Smith and his wife Alice have done a number of presentations on blacksmithing for school groups over the years. (Submitted)

Smith said he’s watched the world shift around the craft he learned to love. Blacksmith shops once sat at the centre of everyday life.

“Everything came from the blacksmith shop,” he said. “Kitchen tools, a plow to go out and plow the ground. It was all done there.”

Smith uses a wide variety of tools to hammer, bend and shape iron into the forms he desires. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Then came welding, mass production and eventually computers shaping metal with a level of precision that once seemed impossible.

“It is absolutely amazing how the computer will cut that out,” Smith said. “Absolutely precise. The holes are cut the exact size.”

And yet, precision is not the same as purpose. Smith speaks often about how society has changed.

“We’re in a society now that’s a throw-away society,” he said. “And now they’re trying to figure out how they can stop all this garbage going to the dump. Well, a blacksmith is a recycler.”

Pop’s Old Forge is reminiscent of a grandfather’s workshop, where nothing is thrown out and everything has a place, even if only he knows where that is. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

Much of what Smith makes begins not with new material, but with what already exists.

“The majority of my iron is from something else,” he explained. “The chisels and punches that I make are shock absorber shafts from your vehicle.”

It’s old metal, but it’s been given a second life.

Even as he approaches his ninth decade, Smith doesn’t speak like someone winding down.

“I am a person that has never been able to sit idle,” he said. “I do have a TV in the house, but it’s not connected to anything. I don’t have time to watch TV because I’m always finding something to do.”

Smith creates works of art, but he also crafts many practical items, like this fireplace set. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

That rhythm shows up in everything Smith touches, from custom railings shaped for individual homes to improvised repairs that save people thousands of dollars.

“My son brought me a part late last summer,” he said. “The new part cost $2,500. I spent five hours fixing it. He took a look at it. He says ‘It’s as good as new, except it doesn’t have paint!’”

There’s pride in that, but not the loud kind. More like a quiet agreement between hand and material.

“It is art,” Smith said simply. “There is no doubt about it. I had a hard job accepting the fact that I was an artist, and now I definitely know I’m an artist.”

One of Smith’s proudest creations is this horseless carriage. He said it took him three winters to put it all together. (Submitted)

That realization didn’t come all at once. It came through repetition. Hammer strike after hammer strike. Iron reshaped until it stopped being simply functional and started becoming expressive.

Even in a world of machines and precision cutting, Smith said he still finds something irreplaceable in the human hand working metal.

And in the end, that is what Pop’s Old Forge really holds. Not just tools, not just iron, But continuity.

A reminder that things can be repaired. That materials can be reused. That skills can be passed on.

And in the middle of it all, Hubert Smith — a man who, even at 89, still sees a piece of red-hot iron and doesn’t think about age or endings at all.

He just thinks about what it can become next.

Hubert Smith took a course on blacksmithing at the Western Development Museum in 1994 and never looked back. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)