In the Blacksmith Shop with Nick Moreau

Passed down through three generations, heirloom tools keep a family tradition alive.

BY ANNIE GRAVES

ire, heat, tools, noise—it’s like a guy’s dream,” grins Nicholas Wicks Moreau, a Connecticut blacksmith, surrounded by the fruits of this conflagration: music stands twined with metal ivy, a nicely proportioned garden gate, a massive chandelier.

For the past year, Nick, 28, has worked side by side with his friend, potter Trevor Youngberg, in Youngberg’s barn, which Nick helped raise. But the road here—to this post-and-beam beauty in Woodbridge—has been circuitous and curving, not unlike the graceful bottle opener he bangs out while we talk, later imprinting it with the Wicks Forge stamp.

“It was a humbling experience, too,” Nick says, leaning into his great-grandfather’s anvil. “I’d never been so bad at something for so long.”

Though he never knew his great-grandfather, who started Wicks Welding in the 1920s, “there was always a picture of him, working on the pylons for the World’s Fair, in my grandfather’s house in Queens,” Nick remembers. When the family operation moved to Danbury, Connecticut, the next generation continued welding. And when his grandfather, Edward, retired, the tools retired, too—to his grandparents’ garage.

Meanwhile, the arts were slumbering in Nick’s blood: His mother is an artist; his grandfather also repaired violins and cellos; and Nick loved pottery and carpentry. But he’d never worked with metal. “My background is construction,” he notes. “So I like things to be artistic and functional— bringing beauty to handmade objects that are used every day.”

In 2011, while in Scotland studying for his master’s in ecological economics, he decided to hunt up a blacksmith. “I wanted to have an artistic experience,” he explains. “Blacksmithing is still ingrained in the consciousness there. They’re still listed in the Yellow Pages.” And sure enough, there it was: The Blazing Blacksmith. “The bus dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, and here was this rustic shop, tools everywhere, and I knew instantly this was where I wanted to be.”

“I don’t work with anyone,” Jim Whitson, a master blacksmith, told Nick politely, and then offered him a cup of tea. A week later, Jim changed his mind, and Nick became his appren- tice in a 3-D environment of handforged gates, furniture, railings, and sculptures. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before,” he marvels. Jim started him making 130 ivy leaves for a work-in-progress gate, cutting and grinding each leaf, tooling it for veins, making up to 300 hammer hits per cutout. Then Nick forged his own first item: an ivy-leaf fire poker.

“The heart and soul of blacksmithing is the anvil work and hammering,” he says. “When you start, you’re constantly adjusting how and when you hit, angling the hammer, angling the poker, and if you don’t have that down, you won’t do it properly. Apprenticing was great—I got to put in all that repeti-