‘I’m living 10-year-old me’s wildest dream.’ Local blacksmith shop makes and sells steel cookware
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Roberts man found a niche making steel cookware
ROBERTS — For Justin McMurry, forging metal with 3,000 degrees of heat and pounding it with a hammer is like letting his inner 10-year-old loose.
The 37-year-old Roberts man is a blacksmith who makes steel cookware — pots, pans, skillets, griddles, utensils and other items. He sells them as part of his business, McMurry Hand Forged. He also teaches blacksmithing classes at the McMurry School of Iron Arts. It all happens in a 2,800-square-foot Quonset hut off Bassett Road.
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The historical aspect of blacksmithing extends even further for McMurry, whose shop has a variety of tools that can be traced back to significant events.
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One of those tools is a leg vice that made parts, materials and tools for “the joining of the Transcontinental Railroad.”
- A Spiro Therm Forge, an oven used to heat metal, sits in the northeast corner of his shop. It was used during the Cold War in California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab detonated the first contained underground nuclear explosion on Sept. 19, 1957, according to its website.
- Also in McMurry’s shop is a 250-ton four post hydraulic platen press. It was used to develop the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest jet-propelled aircraft.
McMurry opened his shop in 2021, but he found a niche in this particular market about five years ago when he was living in California.
“I started doing cookware on a whim, and it absolutely blew up for me,” McMurry tells EastIdahoNews.com.
McMurry became a licensed blacksmith about 15 years ago, but his interest in the trade started when he was a 7-year-old boy in Sutter’s Fort State Park in Midtown Sacramento.
“It was the first major fort in California, and there’s a blacksmith shop there,” says McMurry. “I was running around, and the blacksmith that ran it took me under his wing (and let me) run the bellows. That’s all it took for me. I’m living 10-year-old me’s wildest dream.”
What he likes most about it is seeing a raw piece of steel transform into something beautiful and useful. Watch him make a decorative leaf in the video above.
The historical nature of the profession is an appealing aspect for him as well.
Before the Industrial Revolution in the 1870s, McMurry says the blacksmith was a “jack of all trades” who made iron and provided tools for just about every type of occupation. When Henry Bessemer developed a process for producing steel by removing impurities with a blast of air, blacksmiths were no longer a necessity.
“The blacksmith found himself with a choice, and that choice was either find a niche you can (thrive in) or find yourself out of a job,” says McMurry.
From about 1870 to 1950, the blacksmith almost disappeared completely. Then in the 1970s, there was a huge resurgence of the trade focused on artistic production. The Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America was formed in 1973 to “preserve and promote blacksmithing as an art and a craft.”
“Now, you have local affiliate (groups) where blacksmiths get together, teach each other and keep the craft going,” says McMurry.
Today, there are between 5,000 and 10,000 blacksmiths in the U.S., according to NPR. Of those, only 10% do it professionally. McMurry says being able to make a living at it now is difficult because it requires the ability to make something a machine can’t.
“When you see something that is made with a hammer in the fire at the anvil, it has a particular look to it. There’s an energy, a light in that object that a machine can’t replicate,” he says.
It’s this artistic aspect of the trade that’s allowed blacksmithing to survive, he says.
McMurry’s products are available online. He’s developed his own curriculum for those who want to learn the craft. He also has classes for people who just want to make a fun project with friends or family. To sign up or learn more, click here.
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