Step back into the 1800s with Ernie Klapmeier
Ernie Klapmeier looks at the class of elementary school students gathered before him in the blacksmith shop at Naper Settlement and snares their attention in a not-too-subtle way.
“You work, you eat!” he shouts. “You don't work, you don't eat!”
A historian and educator at the 19th-century living-history museum at 523 S. Webster St. in downtown Naperville, Klapmeier works hard to blend his role as a teacher into that of an informative and entertaining blacksmith.
“In the past, people worked for food. Your survival depended upon your production,“ Klapmeier said. “For me, history has always been a passion and ... it's how you bring that passion to life for yourself as well as for everybody else.”
Klapmeier says he's talked to thousands of people during his nine years as a museum educator at Naper Settlement.
“You can see the light, hear the sounds and smell the smoke,” Klapmeier said, as he passed around a recently forged hook to students in the blacksmith shop.
He says the shop in the 1800s was the modern equivalent of a hardware store.
During his demonstrations, he muscles a pulley to draw in air from a big bellows that feeds the coal-fired forge up to 3,000 degrees. He watches the color of the fire to determine when to pull out his iron.
As Klapmeier teaches attentive students the molecular characteristics of hammering and shaping glowing iron around an anvil horn to make a hook, he also explains the primary duty of a workingman in the 1800s.
“In the past, everything a blacksmith did, he wanted his customers to be happy. If they're happy, they will buy it and he will make money … and fulfill that first responsibility of a man, to put food on the table,” Klapmeier said.
Whether he is teaching in the blacksmith shop, print shop, one room schoolhouse, or Martin Mitchell Mansion area of Naper Settlement, Klapmeier credits today's life of luxury to the sacrifices of previous generations who stood on the ramparts and kept the country safe.
“As a re-enactor, as a living historian, my job is to keep these stories alive. We are pretending to do things in the past, because we are not really going there. That would be horrible,” Klapmeier said. “But as a living historian, you are tasting the past in a way that you can't get out of a book.”
For details about the museum, visit napersettlement.org.
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