One of the foundries mentioned in last week’s history column was Wake Forest Foundry, founded in 1903, and a memoir, Small Town Boy, written by Grady Patterson for his children and grandchildren, includes a visit to the foundry
Grady grew up in Wake Forest in the 1930s and 1940s and was friends with Jimmy Johnston, whose grandfather was James B. Saintsing who operated the furnace at the foundry. Grady tagged along with Jimmy one day.
“It was exciting to see Mr. Saintsing perched up in his little room above and to one side of the furnace, the red glow of the intense bellows-driven fire playing across his face as he manipulated the levers swinging the giant bucket-shaped ladle of metal into the furnace and, once its contents were melted into a molten silvery mass, back out of it for pouring. In my childish imagination, I was reminded of the fires of Hell and Satan manipulating levers to control them.
“The foundry was in an immense warehouse of a building. Scattered across its dirt floors were large molds measuring about three feet square. They had the appearance of wooden boxes containing a sandy gray clay substance of which the surfaces of the mold were constructed. Once the top and bottom sections of the mold were fastened together, it would then be filled with molten metal. Often exceedingly hot metal would splash or spill, literally igniting the ground around the mold. After each mold had cooled sufficiently, it would be knocked apart to reveal the metal objects which had been produced.
“On this particular day plowshares were being cast. These were the pointed metal objects farmers attached to the bottoms of their mule-drawn plows. Throughout the previous day, foundry workers had carefully pressed sample plow shares into the sandy clay of the molds to form the shapes for the new plowshares. Each mold made four plowshares, and great care was required not to disturb the mold once it was prepared.
“Jimmy and I watched with fascination as his grandfather maneuvered the giant ladle of molten metal out of the furnace and upended it to pour its silvery contents into a smaller pouring pot mounted on stout wooden handles which were held by four powerful-looking men stripped to the waist, their sweat-covered muscles bulging in the intense heat. They were intent on only one thing, reaching their destination to dispose of their molten burden.
“And their destination just happened to be the mold beside which we were standing! Behind us was the wall; before us were the men cursing at us for being in the way; and on either side of us were the carefully constructed molds. There was only one thing to do – get out of there as fast as possible! We did exactly that, but in the process we ruined two of the carefully crafted molds, which fell completely apart as we trampled them.”
The foundry went out of business in the 1940s, and it may have done so because its raw material stream (scrap metal delivered by trains into a large hopper) dried up. Every bit of metal was needed for the war effort, and Grady later describes how he and other Boy Scouts scoured the woods and fields around town for metal bits which they put into the hopper for transport to factories making guns and planes and tanks.
(The Dunn Plow Company began at unknown date in what its owner, W.B. Dunn, called “an old government shed in Forestville.” Dunn must have used other raw material than scrap metal for his plows and other implements, because when he moved the business to Wake Forest he located it at the intersection of Brooks and Jones streets, far from the trains that supplied the Wake Forest Foundry. If you have any information about the Dunn Plow Company, please get in touch with the editor
One Response
“Hi, this is Grady Patterson, the author of small-town boy. It pleases me tremendously that you have published an account from my book. I hope that my old friend James Johnston is also reading this article and doing well.”
This note was written by Grady’s son, Pat. I am sitting with the “Small Town Boy” in his nursing home in Raleigh.