It is important to understand the enormous geographic scales involved in comparing examples of blacksmithing globally. For example, Africa is the largest continent and the most ethnically diverse continent on Earth.11 Consider also that the Russia Empire was large enough to contain multiple time zones.12 At its height, it spanned from Poland all the way into Siberia and Central Asia.13
According to early biographies of his life, Samuel Yellin was a Jewish man who was born in 1885 in Galacia, Poland.14 However, recent publications have also located his potential place of origin as being in Ukraine or the Russian Empire, whose borders have shifted over time.15 Yellin became interested in blacksmithing as a child and a Russian blacksmith apprenticed him from the age of seven in the village of Mogiler.16 There he “learned a wide variety of techniques, from making a nail to forging an elaborate piece of armor; at the age of seventeen he was a master craftsman.”17
Teachers can show students an example of virtuosic Russian metalwork, such as the steel fireplace made by the Russian Imperial Arms Factory in Tula that is a part of the British Victoria and Albert Museum collection.18 Advances in metalworking enabled the creation of railways crossing great distances that sped up the formation of empires.19 The Tula fireplace stands out for its British and Russian features, the etching on it and complicated forms made of steel. Tula was a town outside of Moscow that became particularly well known for arms manufacturing in steel and other metals such as gold and bronze.20
One of the major concerns of the Russian Empire was unification and it opposed the independence of Poland and was hostile to Jewish people for not assimilating.21 During the 1830s – 1840s the Russian state was primarily concerned with opposing Polish nationalism and used Ukrainians as archetypes of traditional Russianness.22 By the 1880s, Jewish academics, business people and artists were emigrating from the Russian Empire to other countries.23 The year 1905 was marked by an increase in pogroms against Jewish people within the Russian Empire.24
In 1906 Samuel Yellin emigrated to the United States of America and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art.25 By 1907 he was teaching a program on wrought iron in the Metals Department and by 1915 he received the certification of Master craftsman in blacksmithing.26 He had his own firm which began in Philadelphia by 1909.27 I learned about Samuel Yellin from seeing a wrought-iron grille by him in the J.P. Morgan Library and Museum. His first large commission in 1911 was for the J.P. Morgan Estate.28 His greatest commission for decorative wrought iron was for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1924 ‘comprising of two hundred tons of decorative wrought iron.’29
The natural uses of wrought iron are as protective devices and restraints. Many consider that a grille for a window is meant to be a security device to keep people out. Yellin saw this in an entirely different way. He stated that in this country, ‘iron is used as a barrier not a bridge.’ He was always concerned with making a visual bridge from the people to the building or place where it used to be.30
Yellin experimented with different techniques of forging wrought iron and sought knowledge about the material.31 A frequent traveler, Yellin collected ironworks and curated his own displays in a drafting room and a library.32 In West Africa blacksmiths were not typically enslaved but the iron shackles they produced were used in the slave trade and for war in state formation.33 His firm grew to have a workforce of 268 people by 1928 that included people from other immigrant communities such as West Africans who incorporated designs like adinkra symbols.34
Yellin’s ironwork in the Manuscript and Archives Room at Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University is described by Kent Bloomer, Professor Adjunct of Architectural Design as virtuosic in how he transformed hot iron into seamless organic forms.35 Yellin’s work on the Yale Campus can also be seen at other locations, such as the Humanities Quadrangle, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Memorial Quadrangle.36
