Forging ahead: Whiteside County tradesmen keep centuries-old craft alive

MORRISON – You’ve probably never thought of the blacksmith as a superhero, but who else can bend steel with their hands and lay claim the title of a real iron man?

Before industrious inventors ushered in a revolution and factories fired up furnaces to churn out tools, the trusty blacksmith – red-hot metal in hand, sweat running down their furrowed brow – toiled over a flaming furnace, transforming iron into tools that helped build cities, farm the land and forge a nation. It was an age of horse power and fire power.

These days, it’s an age of mass production. The Industrial Age made the town smithy less of a need and more of a novelty. However, even in this age of assembly lines, there’s still an appreciation and demand for handmade goods, and some local craftsmen have a supply to meet that demand.

Daryl Drennen of Prophetstown and Rob “Ike” Isaacson of Morrison are wielding tongs and tools while pounding on anvils to make metal creations like the blacksmiths of decades and centuries ago. When they aren’t in their sheds firing up their coal or gas forges and hammering away, they make the rounds at local events demonstrating a skill that dates to medieval times.

Drennen and Isaacson have teamed up at events to show people how metal can be manipulated to create one-of-a-kind art, tools and other items.

The demonstrations do more than entertain. They educate, too, teaching today’s generation the important role blacksmiths played in history when they created everything from tools of trades to tools of war – and the role they still play today.

“Without blacksmiths, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” Isaacson said. “We wouldn’t have all of this industrial-age stuff.”

“You have this idea in your mind, and you have an immovable object, but you can move it. You make what you have in your mind. There’s something about taking a piece of steel to an anvil. You have a piece of steel and you know what you want to do with it, and then doing it is great.”

—  Daryl Drennen, blacksmith

Back in the day, blacksmiths were such an important part of a community that passing along the skill was a necessity. That’s how Drennen learned the skill about a decade ago, watching Isaacson use almost 35 years of creating knives, yard art and crosses to pick up on the craft.

After seeing Isaacson create pieces, it would get Drennen’s mind flowing with a little creativity of his own.

“You have this idea in your mind, and you have an immovable object, but you can move it,” Drennen said. “You make what you have in your mind. There’s something about taking a piece of steel to an anvil. You have a piece of steel and you know what you want to do with it, and then doing it is great.”

What Isaacson passed on to his longtime cohort has since been passed on to Daryl’s son, Patrick, who got his first taste of the forge about 7 years ago. Today, father and son operate Daryl’s backyard shed as Hillbilly Hollow Forge.

“I got a call one day and was told to come to Rob’s because they needed some help,” Patrick said. “I get there, the door opens, [My dad’s] holding a hammer in front of me near the forge. ‘Beat this and repeat.’ That’s how it was. It got me hooked.”

For Isaacson, his passion for the trade began when he attended Southeastern Community College in West Burlington, Iowa, to study gunsmithing.

“I went to college for gunsmithing, and one of the instructors ran a booth,” Isaacson said. “I helped him set one up and was kind of hooked on it. I stayed with him for about a week, and I’ve been pounding iron ever since.”

Damascus steel knives are among Isaacson’s most cherished creations. The unique steel has a wavy, patterned design, but is hard and flexible while maintaining a sharp edge. It’s made by laying different types of steel on one another and forge-welding them together. Most types of Damascus are 100 to 200 layers, but one of Isaacson’s favorite projects was making a 480-layer blade.

“It was raw power with a lot of hitting,” he said. He made the piece shortly after he began teaching Daryl the craft.

Throughout his 3 1/2 decades firing forges, Isaacson has made lantern holders, S-hook chains, bottle openers, yard art flowers and cattails, and hammers and axes.

“If anyone has an idea, they can tell us what it is, and we’ll try to make it,” Isaacson said. “Right now, I’ve been doing a lot of knives and flowers. Women like flowers, and guys like knives.”

Daryl has done similar projects since he began, and they often share their work with one another.

“We give each other ideas,” Isaacson said. “We also get critiqued, too. We’ll go, ‘How’s this look?’ Or, ‘Why don’t you do this instead of this?’ [We’ll go], ‘Not a bad idea, I’ll try it.’”

Sometimes there will be moments of blunt honesty.

“Not only do we work together, we’ll also give each other a hard time,” Daryl said, but the hard times stop when the work begins during their demonstrations.

During those events, they’ll even put tools in the hands of people who come to see the demonstrations, young and old alike, and let them take a whack at blacksmithing – with proper supervision, of course.

The smiles on people’s faces when they bring the hammer down, that “Hey! I did that!” moment, can melt hearts, even ones that have spent years around a forge.

“I like teaching people,” Isaacson said. “I like showing them what we do. If you want to try it, grab a hammer. Most people think with steel, you’re not going to move it because it’s hard. We’ll get it red hot and take a small hammer and move steel with it.”

Once someone gets a hammer in hand, it’s easy to see why people get hooked.

“I like it when people come up to you and you can show them how to do stuff, and then they want to try their hand at it,” Patrick said. “It says something when you’re just talking with them and showing them this-and-this, and we’ll go, ‘Here you go.’ When the metal comes out from the forge and it’s red hot, when you start moving it, it’s very soothing to see that you can actually manipulate it to what you want it to be.”