By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Back in the days of the horse & buggy, the blacksmith shop was central to daily life. Horses needed shoes. Buggies needed wheels and springs. And all sorts of other household goods were forged by hand at the local smithy. Brandon’s illustrious inventor Thomas Davenport, he of the electric motor, even had a day job as a blacksmith.
Few traces of these once-common shops remain these days. Once the automobile replaced the horse as the primary means of transportation, blacksmithing became obsolete and the dirty, dingy workshops began to disappear.
Brandon is fortunate to have one of its 1800s blacksmith shops still standing. It’s a small structure on Briggs Lane, which curves around the building that houses The Bookstore on Conant Square and runs downward toward the Neshobe below the lower falls. And it’s been given new life by its current owner, Jeff Haylon, who acquired the building when he bought the adjacent 1800s house in 2021. Originally from Connecticut, Haylon moved to Brandon from Texas.
“It was a series of flukes,” he said in a recent conversation at the shop. “A friend was working in Vermont. I was looking to buy a home. The house had been on the market for a while; it wasn’t in the best shape. The shop was falling apart. It was what I could afford.”
Haylon, a professional woodworker and cabinetmaker, was only 24 when he bought the spread.
“I was very excited and very naïve,” he laughed. “I had no concept of how much work it would be. But I have no regrets.”
Haylon has spent the past few years returning the shop to functionality. The old smithy is now his woodshop, full of the modern tools of his trade. There are still plenty of reminders of the building’s past life—there are horseshoes hanging on the original hand-hewn posts and beams—but Haylon has stabilized the structure and brought it into the 21st century.
“I had to lift the north side of the shop to repair the foundation and replace rotted sill beams,” he said. “I replaced half the slate roof, put in energy-efficient windows, replaced the doors, replaced the siding, and installed insulation. It’s now tolerable in winter.”
There’s an open upper floor, essentially a loft, that still yearns for a renovation, which Haylon hopes to tackle this winter.
“My goal is to maintain the historical relevance of the building, but on my terms,” he said. He’s avoided seeking preservation grants because they come with strings attached and he wants to retain as much flexibility as possible.
“I think the best way to honor an old workshop is to continue to produce things in it. This project has been 100% self-funded. That preservation money would be better spent elsewhere.”
Despite all the work the shop has needed, Haylon remains impressed by the durability of its pre-industrial construction.
“The timbers are still rock solid,” he noted. “It’s testament to the strength of post-and-beam. The place was essentially derelict for 40 years and it was still recoverable.”
Haylon’s trajectory may be ancestrally preordained: he is a descendant of John Howland, an indentured carpenter who arrived in America on the Mayflower. And more than 300 years later, he’s continuing the family tradition of woodworking in New England.
The building itself doesn’t go back quite as far as Haylon’s own Mayflower roots, but it’s certainly one of the earlier buildings still standing in downtown Brandon, appearing on maps going back to the mid-1800s, when it was the repair shop for the Brandon Iron & Car Wheel company, which smelted iron ore mined in Forest Dale and manufactured wheels for railroad cars. Before Brandon Iron, it was likely part of the whiskey distillery that was run by Roger Fuller in the brick house next to Haylon’s on Briggs Lane, which was called Furnace Street back then.
By the early 1900s, at the dawn of the automobile, it was the workshop of John Augustus (J.A.) Richmond, whose main product, horseshoes, still littered the place when Haylon bought it. Haylon also found Victrola albums, farrier’s tools, and a 1913 Vermont license plate that belonged to a Ford Model A and was only the 635th ever issued in the state.
Today, the sign over the door may carry Haylon’s own name (he gave the antique “J.A. Richmond” sign to Richmond’s granddaughter), but the building bears traces of many eras of Brandon’s history. And Haylon is happy to be its steward.
