By Rex Barber
Press Staff Writer
rbarber@johnsoncitypress.comThere aren’t many blacksmiths left these days.
One man in Johnson City has known the trade for nearly a century and has recently opened a blacksmith shop, which he built himself in his own backyard.
James Wycliff Busch, 93, a third-generation blacksmith, who also is a carpenter, minister and traveler, “reopened” his father’s blacksmith shop, which once stood in Centertown, Mo., on Saturday.
He had been working on it quite a while.
On Saturday, he had two blacksmiths belonging to the Bristol Forge at Rocky Mount, Jim Prill and David Oliver, run the shop for about an hour while Busch hosted a meeting of the East Tennessee Region Model-A Restorers Club. Busch is a member of the club and owner of several Ford Model-As.
Most of the tools in his shop and some of the structure are from his father’s and grandfather’s shop, which dates back to at least 1885 and probably before, though Busch does not know the exact date.
“That is original, and would have said Busch’s Blacksmith Shop,” Busch said Saturday at his home as he pointed to the smoky shed behind his house, antique cars parked all around.
He learned the blacksmith and carpentry trades from his father, William C. Busch, who moved the family from Missouri to Riverside, Calif., in 1903.
Busch was born Dec. 11, 1911, near the family’s apple orchard at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains.
He said his father hitched a buggy and drove to get the nearest doctor to deliver him, but the doctor never came, so his grandma delivered him.
Busch’s father taught him a lot.
“He also learned the blacksmith trade and he was also a mechanic, and he built motors for the Air Force in World War I,” Busch said. “And they had a law that if you built the motor, you had to take the maiden flight.”
Busch remembers The Great Depression well, but managed to get a college education, despite the difficulties.
“The hardest years were ’29-’32. We were self-sufficient,” he said of his family’s farm. “They grew their own produce. They also had cattle, horses, mules, pigs, all those things were on our farm. I could ride almost anything that had legs on it.”
After high school, Busch came to study theology at Johnson Bible College in Knoxville in 1929.
He drove across the country in a Model-T, which he said was interesting, to say the least.
“I had a Model-T that my father gave me and I made five trips across the country from Johnson Bible College to my home in California,” he said.
He took some tools with him and did carpentry work to help pay his tuition.
“So I drove all the way from California to Tennessee,” Busch said. “And picked up men who were also going to the school. And that’s how I went to school.”
Busch wanted to create a picture of how much things have changed since his youth.
“When we got into Tennessee, gasoline was 9 cents a gallon,” he said.
After graduation, he began ministering all over the country. Busch preached at five churches in all, mainly on the West Coast and in Tennessee.
He never forgot how to shape iron or how to build a house, though.
In fact, the house he now lives in at 117 Solomon Lane was designed and built, in part, by Busch.
Which leads to the blacksmith shop in his backyard.
“When my grandfather passed away, he gave the blacksmith shop to my father,” Busch said.
Now that shop is his, so he rebuilt it at his home.
“So it has just been handed down from generation to generation,” he said.
Prill, one of the blacksmiths running Busch’s forge Saturday, said they were invited to do it by Busch.
“He built the forge and bellows himself,” Prill said of Busch’s hand-pumped air bellows, instead of a modern propane-fed model. “Anybody who’s a serious blacksmith wouldn’t do it that way ... But it’s good to see the old ways.”
Now that it is built, Busch intends to sell it and, because he is a man of the Lord, give the profits to those who teach God’s word, not to those who merely claim to teach God’s word, he said.
To Busch, those who qualify for the money are third world missionaries who spread the Gospel to those who have never heard it.
“I don’t want anyone to go to the pits,” he said. “I don’t think I would have built it if it wasn’t for that.”
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