Published in The BANAR April 2015 by Don Budd.
Leo Mainville, a bachelor, was a blacksmith when I was a child growing up in Blackburn. His gray wooden shop with two big doors that swung wide open was located in Blackburn Corners (where the daycare facility is located on Innes Road at Cleroux Crescent). He could do anything from shoeing horses to building complicated pieces of farm equipment, of his own invention, such as the potato digger that could be powered by our tractor in the 1940s.
Leo owned one plate, one fork, one knife and one cup and after each meal he would use his bread to carefully clean his plate, cutlery with an expert swipe and then turn these utensils upside down onto his table, ready for his next meal. As a blacksmith, he was a genius, but as a homemaker, he was lacking.
I found this horseshoe, with the nails still intact, in the fields where we now plant our perennial flowers. The fields use to be pasture land on the Kemp homestead. My father-in-law, Eldon Kemp always said when hanging a horseshoe in your home to always have the open end pointing up. If you hang it in reverse, all of your luck will fall out.