Immerse yourself in 1875 at Old Cowtown

Todd Reifschneider figures he’s got a limited amount of time to show people the coolness of blacksmithing. And he plans to do just that at Old Cowtown Museum on Saturday.

“People will give you 15 minutes of their time to demonstrate something,” Reifschneider said. “I like to pick projects where they can see it all the way from the beginning to the end.”

Reifschneider will be one of about 75 historical re-enactors at Old Cowtown’s “Day in the Life” event. The costumed volunteers and Cowtown staff will go about their business as if it were a typical – albeit busy – day in 1875 Wichita. Among the events spread out in the museum’s 40 buildings, dusty streets and fields: a church fundraiser featuring music and dancing, a baseball game, an auction at a recently foreclosed farm, a newly-married couple receiving well-wishers at home and an embroidery class for young women.

“It’s really a complete immersion event,” said Angela Cato, marketing director for the city of Wichita’s division of arts and cultural services. “Every one of the volunteers are going to stay in one particular character. They’re not going to break character. If you go to the blacksmith shop, you’re going to be talking to the blacksmith there.”

That would be Reifschneider. Like many of the volunteers, he’ll be portraying an actual person from Wichita’s past – Nels Nelson, a Prussian immigrant who arrived here and set up a blacksmith shop in 1873. Reifschneider, a project manager for Automation-Plus, was a member of a local blacksmithing club when word went out six years ago that Old Cowtown was in need of one.

“People say it’s a lost art,” he said. “We’ve got a club doing it, so it isn’t lost.”

Old Cowtown’s blacksmith shop is fully functioning, with a forge capable of reaching 3,000 degrees, tongs, hammers, water tub and other equipment needed to make “just about anything people could want” back in the 1870s, he said.

Reifschneider said blacksmiths and carpenters were two of the most valuable trades in any town that aspired to grow. There were a dozen of the former in Wichita during that period. Before the arrival of railroads bringing mass-produced metal goods from the East, a blacksmith might be the only source for such goods in a frontier town. After railroads came, blacksmiths were still necessary, he said. But they became “more of the carriage repair man, like the auto mechanic of today. There were no auto parts stores back then. There might have been a wagon mass-produced in the East. By the time that wagon reached the West, it needed major repairs. It shook itself apart.”

Blacksmiths also continued to do a lot of work on farm implements, he said. Nelson was a blacksmith for about 10 years in Wichita before buying a farm on the west side of town and living the rest of his life there. He was a husband and father of two children who served on the school board and briefly as a deputy, according to research in the museum files.

On Saturday, Reifschneider plans to crank up the forge to about 2,000 degrees – a point he gauges by the color of the steel.

“When you walk in the shop, you’ll see it’s not very well-lit,” he said. “That’s by design. That way you can see the color of the steel when you pull it out of the fire. That 2,000 degrees is a bright yellow color.”

He said he’ll make small decorative leaves and hooks, including one with a nail head built into it “that you could drive into a fence post and have a hook for a harness. That actually is a period-type piece that would have been done” in the 1870s. He’ll probably make some brackets and chains for the museum’s horse-drawn wagons as well.

Reifschneider said he’ll try to remain in character Saturday, but occasionally it’s difficult. A couple of years ago, two men in cowboy hats came into the blacksmith shop asking him to make wheels for a wagon.

“I took them to be volunteers,” he said. “As the conversation progressed, it became obvious that they were actually serious and wanted me to make them wagon wheels. I was like ‘hold on.’ ”

This story was originally published June 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM with the headline "Immerse yourself in 1875 at Old Cowtown."