Published in The BANAR September 2006
by Don Budd, Budd Gardens
Several years ago, Budd Gardens began renting lands from the NCC in Blackburn south of the Blackburn Bypass. These fields had been used as pasture land for decades and as we began to till the soil and plant our crops, ancient hidden treasures began to reveal themselves.
Mike Budd and his team of horses in the early 1940’s in Blackburn.
Thrown from different size workhorses, some small some large, horseshoes galore from a different agrarian era kept surfacing. I showed some to my father-in-law, Eldon Kemp, who is now in his mid-eighties. Except for the war years, when he served in the Navy, Eldon has spent his entire life in Blackburn. He picked up one shoe that was different from the rest, as it has several long rusted nails in it and declared, “This is from a horse that died and was either buried out in the fields or left to be disposed of by the wildlife.”
Blackburn always had a blacksmith and I’m sure these men were responsible for re-shoeing the horses that had lost their iron shoes in these fields. Leo Mainville, a bachelor, was the blacksmith when I was a child. He could do anything from shoeing horses to building a complicated piece of farm equipment of his own invention.
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 and 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, that’s a different story.
Another note of wisdom from the past is this. When hanging a lucky horseshoe in your home, always have the open end pointing up. If you hang it in reverse, all of your luck will fall out.
Note: This article was originally printed in the Weekly Journal, August 11, 2006.