Wendell August Forge: America's Oldest Working Forge

In nineteen twenty-three, a Pennsylvania coal miner named Wendell McMinn August started a metalworking forge in Brockway with nothing but hand tools and a repoussé technique he had mastered himself, pressing designs into flat metal from behind to raise them in relief. By nineteen thirty-two, during the Depression, a Grove City banker persuaded August to relocate here, promising the struggling town new industry.

More than a hundred years later, the Wendell August Forge in Grove City is recognized as the oldest and largest forge of its kind still operating in the United States. Craftsmen still work by hand, hammering decorative metalware in aluminum, bronze, and pewter. Every piece carries the mark of a human hand, the same way it did when August first lit his forge in western Pennsylvania a century ago.