Photographs of a horseshoe (top left), a muleshoe (top right), and horseshoe nails (bottom) from the Tom Cook site. Most of the horseshoe nails have been clinched, meaning that ends were bent and cut off during the process of fitting an iron shoe on a horse or mule. Many worn-out mule- and horseshoes were found at the site, along with an abundance of horseshoe nails and even the clinched distal (pointy) ends of horseshoe nails. The iron artifact assemblage demonstrates that horseshoeing was an important part of Tom Cook’s work, as would be expected at a nineteenth-century blacksmith shop on the Texas frontier. Top photos are by Alex Menaker. Bottom image is an “after conservation” photograph taken by the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University.
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University of Texas at Austin
College of Liberal Arts