ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 TAG: 9602200018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: TROUTVILLE
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
The sun is just a peach sliver on the horizon when Ernie Ward rolls his horseshoeing truck out of the garage of his home in northern Botetourt County.
It's 7:30 a.m. on a frosty January morning and there's just enough light to get started.
In the summertime, he might leave as early as 6 a.m., traveling a circuit of farms and stables from Big Island to Floyd County as he hammers out custom-fitted shoes on his forge, files horse hooves, swaps gossip with his customers and carries news from farm to farm.
Farriers, or blacksmiths, have been around about as long as people have been riding horses. It used to be a lifelong profession, passed down from master to apprentice.
But these days, it's fairly unusual for one to stay in the physically demanding business as long as Ward, who's been shoeing for 10 years.
Or for that matter, for one to become such a part of his clients' lives.
A tall brown thoroughbred tugs playfully at the rawhide string of Ward's scarred leather chaps as the farrier squats under the horse, lifting each hoof to be inspected.
"Whisper, don't take Ernie's belt off again, you silly goose," scolds Saddle Creek Stable owner Blanche Mahoney. Ward visits her Rocky Mount boarding stable about every 6 weeks, shoeing eight to 10 horses each time.
When Ward pauses to switch hooves, the horse puts its head on the blacksmith's shoulder and receives a friendly rub on the muzzle.
"She lost one, huh?" Ward asks Mahoney, lifting a shoeless hoof.
"Yeah, I have no idea where it went."
Ward begins scraping dirt out of the hoof, which helps to prevent infection. When he finishes, he'll trim and file the hoof, which is something like cutting excess growth from a person's fingernails.
A rapid talker with a deep Southern drawl, Ward is a small man with a graying brown mustache and a wide smile. Peering down through his thick, black reading glasses, Ward sands the hoof with the elegance and precision of the jewel cutter he resembles. His fingers move nearly as fast as he speaks.
While he works, a couple of farm dogs weave in and out under the horse's belly.
As the soft rubbery scrapings from the horse's inner foot land on the concrete floor, the dogs scarf them up and scurry away, holding the slender white shavings in their mouths like cigarettes.
"That's the filet mignon of the hoof," Ward says with a chuckle. "They say it tastes like candy, but I haven't tried it."
He sights the angle of the hoof. Then he runs his hand up and down the inside of the horse's leg, checking for bruises or injuries that could cause balance problems.
"You have to make the shoe fit the horse," he explains, walking a few paces from the edge of the outdoor stable to the back of his truck, where he fires up his portable forge.
The propane oven glows orange and white, hissing like a hot-air balloon. Waves of heat shimmer in the chilly air as Ward opens the oven and puts a pre-made shoe inside.
Working with hot metal comes natural to Ward, who was trained as a welder in the Navy.
He later studied pipeline work for a power company, but decided it would take too much travel and instead he settled his family back home in Southwest Virginia, where he took various maintenance jobs before he turned to shoeing.
He had bought a horse and couldn't find anyone to shoe it, so he worked weekends as an apprentice to another shoer to learn the trade. Then friends started asking him to shoe their horses.
By the time Ward attended his first seminar with experienced farriers, he said, "I realized I didn't know anything about shoeing. All I knew was how to nail on a shoe."
Ward now spends several days each year studying horse anatomy and new techniques to help hoof and leg injuries.
In his spare time, he and his horse, Magic, volunteer for a statewide mounted search-and-rescue patrol that looks for lost hikers and downed airplanes. He's also an emergency medical technician and president of the Troutville Volunteer Rescue Squad.
Ward extracts the glowing shoe with a pair of tongs and sets it on an anvil to be shaped.
As he hammers, scattering flakes of iron, he and Mahoney talk about a farmer whose pygmy goat had three kids and about another farmer whose cow lost her calves to the frost.
Ward is often a go-between for busy stable owners, delivering cakes, saddle blankets, books and other items from farm to farm. His clients treasure his occasional hand-made gifts, such as wine racks or coathooks made from horseshoes.
After a couple of minutes, Ward takes the steaming shoe to the horse, preparing to "burn" it on - a painless process that will seal the shoe to the hoof for a closer fit.
But at the smell of smoke, the horse bolts.
"Easy, easy, easy," Ward says, coaxing it down.
Working with a spooked horse is one of the regular hazards of the business, like receiving an unwelcome deposit of manure.
"I've had them drop on my shoulder, but if you've got a horse who's real hard to handle, you just go ahead and keep on shoeing," he says.
Standing beside the horse, Ward squats with his toes pointed together and grasps the horse's front hoof firmly between his knees. At the same time, he hooks an arm under the horse's leg to keep it from kicking.
"In this business, it's so easy to get hurt," he said. So far he's had one horse bend his knee backward and another kick him in the head, both of which required surgery.
Ward, 46, came to horseshoeing late in life but is already thinking about slowing down. The self-described workaholic figures he has done about 27,000 shoeings over the last decade, spending most of that time in a back-breaking stoop under 1,000-pound horses that sometimes have a tendency to lean on him.
Last year, he was out for a couple of months with a strained back. "That's usually what puts you out in this job," he said, taking a break to stretch.
Like most self-employed people, Ward has to worry about losing business due to injury or illness. But farriers are also a tight community.
Other shoers split up Ward's clients while he was hurt and sent him the money to keep him going.
That's one of the benefits of belonging to groups like the Virginia Horseshoeing Association, which includes Ward on its board of directors.
Now that Ward is able to work again, he donates money to a farrier in Suffolk who is laid up.
Down the road from Mahoney's stable in Boones Mill, Susan Van Name's 38-year-old Palamino, P.J., has been faltering. On a recent snowy afternoon, Van Name tells Ward, she found the horse lying in a field and unable to get up on its own.
Today is a better day. P.J. is up and walking for his appointment with the horseshoer, but Van Name's not sure how much longer P.J. will be able to hold out.
"I'm afraid we're going to have to put him down," she says sadly.
"He was a real powerhouse in his day. He's given me the best years of his life. There's nothing we haven't done. It's going to really be like losing a friend when I lose him."
Charlie, a dark 15-year-old Arabian, has been P.J.'s constant companion. Van Name is worried that he will be lonely without P.J.
"I was going to talk to Blanche [Mahoney] about it," she says. "Do you think she has room for another horse over there?"
Ward says he's not sure, but then recalls another client who has been looking for a riding horse.
He gives Van Name directions to the client's farm while he examines the old horse's legs and moves them slowly and with care.
"Getting a good shoer isn't easy," says Betty Gillmore. "It's hard to find anybody who takes it as seriously as Ernie does. And it was really hard to get him because he's so popular. He's the best in the area."
Most of the six horses at Gillmore's Botetourt County stable are prizewinners. Her young foal, Junior, is the son of Heisman, a horse made famous in the 1992 Olympics.
"Ernie is really important with this one," she says of the foal. "He's really high-strung and he needs a good patient blacksmith.
"I couldn't keep him a stallion without somebody like Ernie to work with him. He'd be untrainable."
Ward goes the extra mile, she says, recalling how he used a new epoxy to essentially build a new foot when one of her horses had a broken hoof wall.
"He can do anything with a shoe," she says. "If you're his customer, you know you'll be taken care of."
Last winter, when Ward hurt his back, "We couldn't find anybody to shoe for us," Gillmore says. "Ernie helped me buy some basic tools and taught me to shoe.
"I wouldn't call myself a farrier, but he taught me enough to keep myself going. He spent hours teaching me this stuff and he didn't charge me a dime."
"One thing about this job," Ward says as he steers his truck home. "I like horses, and as a general rule, I like people.
"I've been in some jobs where, before you even get to work, you're worried about what could go wrong and your stomach's in knots, and by the time you get to work, you're ready to slug somebody.
"I don't see how you could do a job like this if you didn't like horses and people. It's such hard, physical work. If you didn't enjoy it, it just wouldn't make much sense."
LENGTH: Long : 178 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL/Staff. 1. After fitting it with a new shoe,by CNBErnie Ward does the final filing on a horse's hoof at Betty
Gillmore's stable in Botetourt County. 2. Ward prepares a horseshoe
for a hot fit on a hoof. 3. Ernie Ward on the job at the hind end of
a horse. He's been shoeing the beasts for a decade. color. 4. Ernie
Ward fits a shoe to a horse at the Gillmore stable.