"A satisfied customer is the best advertisement" C. Red & Co.'s calking irons

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Sep 2001 by Larsen, Ray

Calking irons stamped C. Drew & Co. were the ultimate in design,finish, and indestructibility. Any calker worth his salt in time acquired a set of Drew irons, which he cherished like his children and polished by use until they gleamed like silver.

The Marine Historical Association/Antique Tools of Connecticut, 1972.

About fifteen years ago Ray Larsen wrote a two-part article "The Art of the Draw Forger (The Chronicle, Vol. 37, No. 4 and Vol. 38, No. 1) in which he touched on the the history of C. Drew & Co. This article delves further into the history of the company, specifically as regards talking irons, and includes some of the material included in the prior article.

When I was working as a tool forger at C. Drew & Co. of Kingston, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s, a scraggly assortment of boatbuilders and shipwrights regularly turned up at the shop door, looking for talking irons. Never mind that the signless, ramshackle plant lay hidden up a dirt road off a side street in a small, semi-rural town in southeastern Massachusetts. They had some kind of special radar that led them straight to us (Figure 1).

If it was summer, the doors would be thrown open against the hellacious interior heat, and these guys would stop at the doorway and peer in, suddenly hesitant, wondering if maybe this was such a good idea after all. For inside that battered wood and metal building, a miniature version of hell was being played out. In the center of the grimy shop, five huge and ancient forging hammers pounded away at a never ending stream of white-hot billets of tool steel, accompanied by a frightening jumble of roaring, oil-fired furnaces, screeching trim presses, clanking shears, and a half-dozen or so whining, high-speed grinders. All of this was attended by burly, blackened laborers, soaked through with sweat, who clearly had been singled out for punishment reserved only for the truly damned.

Before these boatbuilders could change their minds and flee, Lucky Peavy would materialize before them. Lucky was the foreman at C. Drew, as the locals in Kingston called it, and as such was in charge of finding out what was up.

After taking a moment to compose themselves, the boat builders would begin to spill out their requests for calking irons, liberally laced with lavish praise for their strength, their balance, their durability, and their sheer utilitarian beauty. "Surely," they would argue, "there's a few left somewhere in this cavernous, old wreck of a place, a handful of Number 1 Greasers you might part with for the right money, a reef hook or two, some makers, a small batch of spike irons sitting overlooked in some far corner until now." They'd go on and on as long as you'd let them.

And so it fell to luckless Lucky to turn each and every one of them away: there simply weren't any of the genuine articles around to sell anymore. The company had stopped making them in the 1940s, when wooden boatbuilding entered a period of decline so precipitous that the demand for calking irons all but dried up, falling well below the level required for profitable mass manufacture.

In fact, when I was forging tools at C. Drew some fifteen years ago, the company didn't have a single set of talking iron dies left, and couldn't make them even if it wanted to. It was then I vowed that if I was ever lucky enough to run my own tool shop, I'd make talking irons again, the right way, the way Drew made them in the Golden Age of toolmaking.

What made Drew talking irons so special, and why have they come to have an almost mythical reputation? To answer that, you first have to know something about the Drews and the early history of the company. You also have to know something about the traditional techniques the company used to make these uncommonly good tools. For it was this technology, bordering on art-employed at Drew long after it was deemed obsolete elsewhere-that made the tools so special.

The Drews were first and foremost shipbuilders, starting out in England and then emigrating to America. In a talk before the Jones River Club on 11 December 1957, marking the one hundredth anniversary of C. Drew & Co., Kingston historian Emily Drew, who herself was pressed into service with the company during World War I, reported on the family's early shipbuilding efforts and the beginnings of the company:

Six generations of shipbuilders in the Drew family are known to have existed before 1800. Two of these generations were in England, beginning with Sir Edward Drew who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth with other Devonshire builders, owners, and commanders of the "mosquito fleet" which harassed and then annihilated Great Armada which proud and arrogant Spain had sent to humble a rebellious England. Four generations of the name were in Plymouth County, our branch being associated with Plymouth, Duxbury, and Kingston, in that order. The last of these generations was the famous group of six brothers who ran the Drew yard together the Landing (on the Jones River in Kingston) and who built the Independence, the first commissioned vessel the United States Navy.