Tom Cook’s Clinching Bar

plan view photo of rusty clinching bar with scale bar below — Tom Cook’s clinching bar, found at the site of his blacksmith shop in Bolivar, Texas. Photo by Alex Menaker.

Object: Tom Cook’s Clinching Bar
Date: ca. 1870s to 1890s
Context: Bolivar, Texas in Denton County, Thomas Cook Blacksmith Shop Site (41DN617)

This flat and tapered piece of iron, simple as it is, is part of a long-lost story of life along the Chisholm Trail in North Texas. This clinching bar is one of the 25,000 artifacts recovered from the archeological excavation of farrier and blacksmith Tom Cook’s shop. Tom Cook (1840-1898) was a freedman, a formerly enslaved African American. As a free Texan in the late nineteenth century, Tom Cook not only owned his own blacksmith shop, but he raised a family and became a vital member of the community, influencing later generations of North Texans, including some continuing to live nearby today.

color photo of a woman standing in an office, smiling and holding a clinching bar — Ms. Betty Kimble during a visit to Stantec’s archeology laboratory in Austin in May 2025. She is holding the clinching bar and smiling because it was once used by her great grandfather, the Bolivar blacksmith Tom Cook. Photograph by Doug Boyd.

Tom Cook’s blacksmith shop was in Bolivar, a small town along the Chisholm Trail, the famous cattle drive route stretching from South Texas to the railroads in central Kansas. Tom Cook provided important services for travelers as well as for local community members working on their farms and homesteading across the Texas frontier. Archeologists working for Stantec Inc. brought to light the remains of his shop during excavations for the Bolivar Archeological Project, a Texas Department of Transportation project, in 2020-2021. The site and clinching bar are among many important archeological finds made because of road construction projects, as Texans balance building for the future with appreciating and learning from the past.

black and white photo of a man using a clinching bar — East Texas blacksmith J. T. Ruffin “dressing a horse’s hoof." From Richard Allen Burns, “African-American Blacksmithing in East Texas” in Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore, University of North Texas Press, Denton, 1996.

While not all farriers are blacksmiths, and not all blacksmiths are farriers, Tom Cook was both. What is a farrier? Farriers work with horses, removing and re-applying iron shoes, mending old shoes and producing new shoes, and filing and cleaning hooves. Farrier work involves the use of essential common blacksmith tools and equipment, such as the anvil, a hammer and hot-cut chisel or hardy, in addition to a range of specialized tools specific to farrier work. Tools for making and fitting horseshoes and shoeing horses include a range of tongs, punching tools, files and rasps, butterises (a tool to trim a horse’s hoof before shoeing), hoof knives, hoof picks and parers, and shoe spreading tools, among others. In addition to the clinching bar, excavations on the Tom Cook site recovered a broken hoof nipper, a farrier tool used to trim hooves.

The clinching bar, also called a “clinch” or “clinch block,” would have been held by the farrier, serving as a hand anvil to “draw the shoe tightly against the hoof” as they drove a horseshoe nail through the hoof at a particular angle; this wouldn’t hurt the horse if done properly since a hoof is insensitive like a fingernail. The clinching bar protects the farrier’s hand when nailing horseshoes. The nail ends are bent when the farrier drives them through the shoe and hoof. The end hits the clinching bar and bends, and then the farrier cuts off the protruding nail, and then files it down until it is smooth with the hoof edge.

plan photograph of nails and horseshoes on a white background with scale bars — 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.

During Tom Cooks’s life, industrialization was in progress across much of the United States, and mass-produced items began to replace hand-made craft items. As a blacksmith and farrier, Tom would have at times made many of his own tools, and at times acquired and used mass-produced tools, such as those advertised in the late-nineteenth-century catalogs of Sears and Roebuck Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co.

Tom probably forged this clinching bar specifically to fit his hands and his style of horseshoeing. The clinching bar measures 7 and 7/8 inches in length, and the main bar is tapered, measuring 1 and 5/8 inches wide by the handle and tapering to 3/8 inches at the end. The proximal end of the specimen is narrow and appears to be broken, and it is likely that it once had a curved handle that could be hooked onto a belt for easy access.

Blacksmiths have been integral to communities across the globe and throughout world history. Ironworkers and blacksmiths were viewed as having great power and significance for their ability to transform and move hot metal, from ancient Africa and Europe to the Americas and beyond. Before the automobile, horses and work animals were essential for transportation and as beasts of burden. The hooves of work horses employed to carry heavy loads across rocky landscapes and along stone paths were well worn. Consequently, societies throughout time have crafted ways to care for and support horse’s hooves. For instance, excavations of Roman sites have recovered a variety of horseshoes that were called “hipposandals” (from the Greek hippos for horse) and were “crescent-shaped iron sandals,” according to author of The Blacksmith, Ironworker and Farrier, Aldren Watson. Moreover, blacksmiths and farriers also had to cultivate a practice to effectively manage and care for a horse while shoeing, which often included talking to the horse. Because of this special relationship with horses, village blacksmith-farriers often served as local veterinarians as well.

color photo of a side view of a rusty clinching bar with a scale bar below it — Tom Cook's clinching bar, side view. The right end is broken off but was probably a curved handle.

As horses gave way to the automobile, farriers and blacksmiths became less common. Interestingly, the first auto mechanics were trained as blacksmiths. In 2024, an African American freedman blacksmith and inventor named Reeves Henry was recognized with a Texas Historical Commission Marker (No. 23482) acknowledging that he was the first auto mechanic in Texas history!

Although the archeological team working at the Tom Cook site had over 100 years of combined experience, none of them were blacksmiths or farriers, so they had little idea of what exactly this metal artifact was when they first found it. It was identified thanks to a collaboration with professional blacksmith Kelly Kring, one of countless artifacts he helped identify.

two side by site color photos of the same man. On the left, he stands next to a museum exhibit panel titled, — William Howard Clark, a retired law enforcement officer and the great, great grandson of the nineteenth century blacksmith Tom Cook, during a visit to the Quakertown House Museum in Denton, Texas. Howard joined the archeological crew and helped uncover the features and artifacts at the Tom Cook Blacksmith Shop from September 2020 to February 2021. Following in the footsteps of his ancestor, Howard has been learning blacksmithing, studying under the direction of professional blacksmith Kelly Kring (back to camera in right photograph). At right, Howard demonstrated blacksmithing techniques at the Denton Juneteenth Festival in 2023. Photographs by Doug Boyd.

The identification and historical context of Tom Cook’s clinching bar highlight the importance of collaboration and learning together. As part of the Bolivar Archeological Project, archeologists collaborated with Tom Cook’s descendants, who connected the archeologists with the African American community in Denton County, and assisted in oral history research. Howard Clark, the great, great grandson of the blacksmith Tom Cook, even joined the archeological crew and helped excavate the blacksmith shop. Clark took up the practice of blacksmithing to honor his ancestor’s legacy—reminding us, the past is never past!

Credits

Exhibit prepared and authored by Alex Menaker and Douglas Boyd (Stantec, Inc.) and edited by Emily McCuistion and TBH editor Steve Black. Unless otherwise stated, images used courtesy of the Texas Department of Transportation, Environmental Affairs Division, Cultural Resources Section.

Alex Menaker is a Senior Archeologist with Stantec Consulting, Inc. and Research Fellow with the University of Texas, managing archeological projects across the United States. His role as a Co-Principal Investigator on the collaborative and public Bolivar Archeological Project highlights his commitment to community engagement and historic preservation. Additionally, Dr. Menaker has conducted archeological research across the Americas and received his PhD from the University of Texas, with research involving a multidisciplinary and community engaged project in the Southern Peruvian Andes.

Douglas Boyd is a Senior Archeologist with Stantec Consulting, Inc. and has been engaged in CRM archeology in Texas since 1975. He has a BA degree from West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M) and an MA degree from Texas A&M. He works with the nonprofit Plains Archeological Research and is currently involved in studies of prehistoric architecture of Southern Plains villagers. He is also a Fellow of the Texas Archeological Society and has helped co-direct the youth group archeology at the annual summer field school for the past 25 years. Boyd also serves on the Antiquities Advisory Board and the Texas Preservation Trust Fund advisory board to the Texas Historical Commission. At Stantec, Boyd is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Bolivar Archeological Project and a proponent of community-based archeology.

Print and Online Sources

Burns, Richard Allen
1996 African-American Blacksmithing in East Texas. In Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore, pp. 166-194. University of North Texas Press, Denton. Online version at Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/72199, accessed May 22, 2025.

Franklin, Maria, Douglas K. Boyd, Kevin Hanselka, Williams Howard Clark, and Halee Clark Wright
2021 Finding Tom Cook: Community Archeology Reconnects Descendants with their Ancestor’s Legacy. Texas Heritage, Vol. 2, pp. 8-13. Available online at: https://www.txdot.gov/content/dam/docs/division/env/archeological-sites/finding-tom-cook-texas-heritage.pdf, accessed May 22, 2025.

Gall, Michael
2016 Striking While the Iron is Hot: Federal Period Rural Blacksmithing in Somerset County, New Jersey. Northeast Historical Archaeology, 45:18–45.

Menaker, Alex, William Howard Clark, Douglas K. Boyd, Maria Franklin, Halee Clark Wright, and Kevin Hanselka
2023 At the Intersections of History: Collaborative, Public Archaeology of the Nineteenth-Century Tom Cook Blacksmith Shop along the Chisholm Trail in Bolivar, Texas. Advances in Archaeological Practice 11(3):328–340. Electronic document, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/0E1F9057EBA549603B76973E49EEEFB3/S2326376823000153a.pdf/at_the_intersections_of_history.pdf, accessed May 1, 2025.

Perszewski, Ron
2018 Filling Your Shoeing Box for the First Time. Online post in Business Practices, Equipment, July 28, 2018. American Farriers Journal. Electronic document, https://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/10386-filling-your-shoeing-box-for-the-first-time, accessed May 22, 2025.

Rice, Priscilla
2024 Historical Marker in Forney Honors the Once Forgotten Legacy of an African American Inventor. KERA News, NPR for North Texas, online. Electronic document, https://www.keranews.org/news/2024-10-21/historical-marker-forney-reeves-henry-mechanic, accessed May 22, 2025.

Smith, H. R.
1966 Blacksmiths’ and Farriers’ Tools at Shelburne Museum. The Shelburne Museum Inc., Shelburne, Vermont.

TxDOT
2025 Bolivar: The Once Wild West. Website for the Bolivar Archeological Project sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation, Environmental Affairs Division, Cultural Resources Management Section. Electronic document, https://www.txdot.gov/about/campaigns-outreach/archeology-history/txdot-archeology/bolivar.html, accessed May 1, 2025.

Watson, Aldren
1977 The Blacksmith, Ironworker and Farrier. W.W. Norton and Company: New York.

Texas Beyond History

Tom Cook’s Clinching Bar