Author’s note: I was raised at the Roaring Forge, my imagination wandering among countless metal statues and functional ornaments decorating every shelf and wall. As a teenager, I helped my father, Joe Burleigh, with installations in and around Aspen. This report is informed from a deep sense of reverence for the place and its people.
Tucked away on Buggy Circle, there is a building where change has come much slower than in the surrounding Carbondale community. Within the walls of the two-story log cabin, red-hot steel is hand forged by artisans commissioned to create railings, gates, light fixtures and tools — or inspired to make art that withstands the tests of time. From two large garage doors, flaking with orange and black paint from outworn murals, kinetic sculptures spill onto the surrounding yard, spinning and rocking with the wind. Objects created here adorn private homes and public spaces throughout the Roaring Fork Valley and far beyond.
John Hoffman dreamt it up nearly half a century ago. Having worked with sculptors in the Denver area and moved to the Roaring Fork Valley to attend Colorado Mountain College, Hoffman acquired the land and began sketching plans while forging at the red barn between Weant Boulevard and 4th Street, just south of Carbondale’s Main Street. By August of 1983, Hoffman had a plan and a large stack of rough logs from Dotsero. Within six months, the building was under construction with help from other area blacksmiths including Will Perry, Franz Froelicher and Ken Riley.
The Roaring Forge says something about a legacy of craftsmanship as an integral part of Carbondale’s economic and social fabric. Five self-employed blacksmiths each have a table and access to all the necessary tools to fabricate works big and small, including a cooperative model to reduce their overhead costs.
To this day, Riley has a table at the Forge. Steven Lock, the artist who created the “Helping Hands” sculpture which stood at the southwest corner of 3rd Street and Main for more than three decades, also worked from the Forge early on, as well as Vaughn Shafer.
At the time, custom iron work was in high demand. Blacksmiths had easy access to coal mined and coked in Redstone and a burgeoning clientele had a taste for rustic flourishes at their mountain chateaus. Nowadays the Forge operates with natural gas. Oxyacetylene torches at each work station allow for spot heating smaller projects so the forge doesn’t always have to be lit. In the winter there’s extra motivation to fire it up for the collateral benefit of warming the building. In the summer, not so much.
For several years, the blacksmiths would work together on large chandeliers. Selling one a month would help cover rent for everyone. A few of these chandeliers continue to hang from the ceiling of the workshop in varying stages of completion. The cooperative model also allowed the Roaring Forge to purchase heavy tools, like a Sahinler power hammer from Turkey, which brings tremendous, repetitive weight to shaping hot metal with the light press of a foot.
Ever the pyromaniac, James Mason, a former Glenwood Springs fire chief, got his table at the Forge 15 years ago. He caught the blacksmithing bug at a two-day workshop in Loveland and moved in when musician-artist Olivia Pevec moved out. His focus is primarily on creating his own sculptures in addition to special commissions.
“I don’t call myself a blacksmith yet,” he humbly stated. “What’s pretty cool about being a part of the Roaring Forge is, if I have a question or need a little help with something, I get four different answers,” he said, referring to the wealth of experience offered by Hoffman, Riley, Joe Burleigh and Tom Semborski.
Burleigh hopped over to the Forge around 1994, after working for Myers & Co. Annually he mentors students from the Carbondale Community School. Tom Semborski joined the team in the early 2000s, soon after moving to the area. Turnover is rare, evidence that the model works.
“The cooperative really does give us all an immense amount of freedom to do what we want to do, or not do anything if we don’t want to,” said Hoffman. “It’s such an amazing format.”
Lately, there’s a preference for sleek, modern features among high-end clients. This requires less forging to make consistent decorative curves, but blacksmiths must take extra measures to hide welds and avoid leaving scratches.
“Rust was a great finish,” Burleigh reminisced.
Not long ago, Rocky Mountain Smiths hosted an annual conference at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS), gathering blacksmiths from throughout the region to trade techniques. The late Francis Whitaker, as a teacher at the school, was paramount to making that a possibility. Whitaker moved his shop from California to the Roaring Fork Valley in 1963 and helped build the Mountain Forge at CRMS in 1989.
The newest addition to the Roaring Forge is Axel Livingston, a young artist born in the Valley. Livingston studied fine arts at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and incorporates blown glass with his metalwork.
“I’d like to see a whole new group of people before we all die. Otherwise we’ll have to clean all this shit up,” Hoffman half-joked.
“That’s very much the truth, though,” Riley said. “It’s so tricked out for what you can do in here that it’d be a shame to see it disassembled, but you need the people.”
“I think there’ll still always be people that can afford the hand-done, individual, personal stuff,” said Mason. “I think you’ll hopefully always have blacksmiths around.”
