A few miles south of Lawrence, in a shop nestled a stone’s throw off U.S. Highway 59, Walt Hull has resurrected an age-old art form.

Two hundred years ago, folks would have called him the “village smith.” He might have made shoes for their horses and barrels for their guns.

But these days the master blacksmith spends most of his time crafting ornate railings, benches, chandeliers and sculptures. And he balks at suggestions that his craft is a lost art.

“No, no, no, no,” he insists. “It was in real trouble in this country from World War II on until the early ’70s, but there’s been a huge renaissance in blacksmithing worldwide.

“There are more blacksmiths working today than there were 50 years ago by far.”

Even at this shop, Hull has recruited a co-worker, Kate Dinneen, to help with projects. But, admittedly, the work has changed through the centuries. Hull rarely does agricultural jobs, for example.

“Neighbors around here will bring some little thing, but you can buy throw-away plowshares cheaper than you can repair old plowshares now. That kind of work has been taken over by industry.”

Hull opened Walt Hull Iron Work, situated on the east side of Highway 59 at Pleasant Grove, in 1989 after picking up his trade from veteran blacksmiths here and abroad. No stranger to metal, he had worked as a fabricator at Zimmerman Steel Co. for 20 years before deciding to strike out on his own.

The spacious shop — equipped with half a dozen anvils, two forges (one coal, one gas), hammers of all shapes and sizes and tools for grinding and welding — is a far cry from his first studio.

“I started working out of my garage on Massachusetts Street, and that wasn’t very satisfactory,” he recalls. “The whole garage was 12 by 18 feet. And so when I moved out here I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Playing with fire

And maybe, in a way, he has. The 63-year-old Hull looks utterly at home in his overalls and leather apron, his gray hair pulled back in a short ponytail at the nape of his neck as he shuffles coal in the forge to intensify the heat. He’s lost in concentration as he pulls a red hot iron out of the 1,400-degree-plus fire, holds it snug against the anvil with calipers and raises a hammer up past his ear.

He brings it down hard on the glowing, malleable metal, quickly transforming a cylindrical rod into a flattened circle. He uses a punch tool to poke a hole through and then moves to the shop’s big daddy: a 100-pound power hammer that could flatten a finger with a single blow. It makes quick work of the steel, too, pulling a long, narrow column out of the tip of the rod.

“I’m gonna make that piece of bar go through that hole,” he says, placing the project in the gas forge to reheat.

Photo Gallery: Hammer & Heat 6News video: Lawrence blacksmith resurrects age-old art form

A few minutes later, he returns to the anvil and gingerly taps the tip of the rod through the hole a few inches below — forming a delicate curlicue from a material that’s anything but dainty.

“You can do just about whatever you can think of,” he says.

Forging rhythm

If you can get past the noise — Hull and Dinneen both wear earplugs to protect against a repetitive din that drowns out the traffic whizzing past on one of the area’s busiest thoroughfares — there’s a magical sense of music and rhythm to the work they do here.

As Dinneen molds the tip of a rod into a sphere, she finds her groove.

Clink, clink, clink, clunk.

Clink, clink, clink, clunk.

Three hammer blows on the steel ball and one on the anvil — over and over again.

“When I started to get good at doing this, you start to get a beat and it just goes a lot easier if you have the rhythm going,” explains Dinneen, who joined Hull’s shop in 1994. “As far as hitting the anvil goes, there are times when I do that because I need to pause because I’m turning the piece, or I have to move the piece and I don’t want to lose my rhythm.

“There are some people who tap on the anvil when they’re thinking, which can be really irritating.”

Lots of irons in the fire

The most difficult aspect of blacksmithing for Hull, who continues his education by attending conferences and belonging to organizations like the Blacksmiths Association of Missouri, has been visualizing the way the material moves.

“The hardest thing for me was to distinguish between what I THOUGHT was going to happen to the iron, or what I WANTED to happen to the iron when I hit it, and what ACTUALLY happened,” he says. “You have to make that decision every time the hammer comes up. You have to notice what you really did, not what you wanted to do.”

Hull appears to have perfected the process when it counts. His work can be seen all over town, from the wall sconces at Corpus Christi Catholic Church to the flowers that climb the windows of a chapel-turned-house at 10th and New York streets to the iron cross suspended at the front of the First United Methodist Church sanctuary.

He and Dinneen even teach a blacksmithing course to Kansas University students Thursday evenings at the shop.

So they tend to stay just about as busy as their counterparts who made armor in the Middle Ages or farm equipment on the early American frontier. And, despite their modern technology, they still feel a kinship to those masters of a bygone era.

“The welder and the grinder are not what make this shop special,” Hull says. “It’s the heat and the hammer that make us special.”