Thomas Flagg Smithy Project

       The board recently approved the donation of a structure located in Lincolnville, Maine to be moved to Willowbrook. The structure was built by Thomas Flagg in the 1930s and houses a collection of family blacksmithing tools that date back to the nineteenth century as well as many that were handmade by the father of the three flagg daughers who are donating it. The structure is still set up as Thomas Flagg used it for metal work at his farm, including the heating and fitting of horseshoes for his own work horses. Flagg used a work horse for a variety of tasks including haying, planting, and cultivation until he bought his first tractor, a John Deere Model 40 in the late 1940s. His favorite work horse is remembered by his youngest daughter Jane Flagg Jipson, who, with her sisters, Doris [Flagg] Weed and Ellen [Flagg] Garneau, are the donors of this piece of rural Maine history.
      In 2010 the smithy came to my attention when Dana Jipson, husband to Jane Flagg Jipson, took a blacksmithing class at the Curran Homestead Living History Farm and Museum. Jane and Dana were in the midst of a move from Saco to Lincolnville to the farm that Jane had grown up on; this was to be the place of their retirement. Thomas Flagg had passed away a number of years before while his widow Dolores had left the family farm for a nursing home.
      Dana Jipson had learned of the classes being given and wished to learn to use the smithy and tools left by his late father-in-law. Since that time the decision was made to find a home for both the tools and, if the opportunity arose, the smithy that housed them. During the summer of 2010 I would take many donations of both domestic and farm items from this family farm of 200 years for the Curran Homestead collection as its museum director. Having built a blacksmithing shop on the Curran Homestead site in 2009 the museum passed on the offered donation of both the smithy and the collection in 2013, hoping that some other museum would take the opportunity to improve their collection.
       Knowing that the collection was important given that I had digitized family photo albums and spent hours with the family hearing about how much of the material culture was used I presented the concept of a second smithy at Willowbrook which would in conjunction with the present structure serve to  house blacksmithing classes of six to eight students and also house a growing number of tools and equipment that would become a working collection. With the success of our most recent class, and the reality that outdoor classes could be effected by bad weather, I contacted Jane Jipson. She knew of Willowbrook, and said that she would put the matter before her sisters. They approved the idea, as they saw if as yet another opportunity for their father's beloved tools and equipment to again see action and continue to be used.