Local resident demonstrates blacksmith skills
By Daniel Arens
We all have hobbies, interests that we enjoy. But when we develop regular habits of engaging with those interests, our hobbies can also become our area of expertise.
For the last 30 years, Kerwin Lund has been engaging in blacksmith work, making a wide variety of different utensils in his forge, a sort of garage located adjacent to his home.
“This is my hobby,” Lund said. “It keeps me busier than I want it to be.”
Lund, who works at Coteau Properties, produces his products from a number of different sources. He showed a knife he had made out of the rail of a railroad track.
“I do a lot of camping and cookware stuff,” he said.
Over the last five years, he has also begun making decorated signs.
Besides making his own items at his property east of Hazen and south of The Crossroads, Lund also travels around North Dakota and surrounding states to show others how the blacksmith process works.
“I do a lot of demonstrations,” he said, noting he had just recently returned from a German Festival in Fargo.
Recently, Lund was occupied with a major project: recreating a traveling forge to American Civil War-era blueprints. Only one original of these forges survives, located at the Gettysburg Museum, Pa.
“It took me about four years to do it. I didn’t work on it steady,” Lund said.
Lund brought the traveling forge to Rollag, Minn., in 2015.
