Sunday Stills ~ History ~ The Anvil

 

This week’s Sunday Stills Challenge is to photograph people, places, things or events that are older than 60 years old.

There is something rusty, scratched and very heavy sitting in our barn, that could tell us some fascinating stories that go back to the 1600’s.

This historic anvil traveled across the ocean from Germany with my husband’s family, who had been blacksmiths for 1,200 years.

In 1677, my husband’s family received a personal invitation from William Penn to settle in Philadelphia. Some of the family stayed in Philadelphia while some moved to what was then Virginia, (now West Virginia after it became it’s own independent state in 1863).

Around 1862-1863, the Confederate troops stormed through my husband’s family’s farm, after discovering that they had been shoeing and maintaining the Union Calvary’s horses. So in anger and retaliation, they burned his family’s farm to the ground, and threw the anvil into a nearby river (Tygart River) in what is now the man-made Tygart Lake in Harrison County, West Virginia.

 

Sadly, this anvil now just gathers dust in our barn, because my husband’s father was the first generation not to carry on the blacksmith family trade when he chose to go to college to study engineering and computers.

This is the way of modern times. But at least we have these icons of history to remember the past.