Howard Clark and Kelly Kring demonstrated blacksmithing during Denton’s Juneteenth Celebration at Fred Moore Park on Saturday morning.
The demonstration was part of the Texas Department of Transportation’s community archaeology project, which showcased artifacts found where Tom Cook’s blacksmith shop and the Sartin Hotel once stood in Bolivar.
The artifacts displayed on Saturday included horseshoes, nails and miscellaneous hotel items.
Clark is the great-great-grandson of Cook, a freeman who owned a blacksmith shop in Bolivar. Clark forged knives and blades as a hobby before he knew about his ancestor. Now, Howard is following in Cook’s footsteps by blacksmithing.
“Maybe it is in my genes — it’s in my blood,” Clark said after discovering he was Cook’s descendant.
Bolivar is a small rural town about 20 miles north of Denton. Bolivar was once a stop on the Chisholm Trail, a popular cattle drive route between Central Texas and Kansas.
“So most of the things that Mr. Cook was working on were things like wagon parts and horseshoes,” Kevin Hanselka, an archaeologist for TxDOT, said. “He was serving cowboys and ranchers that were traveling up and down the trail.”
TxDOT’s excavation
The artifacts were excavated during TxDOT’s FM455 road widening project.
Hanselka said the first round of surveying the area occurred in 2016. He said they found the foundation of where the Sartin Hotel once stood.
No photographs of the hotel exist, but written accounts suggest it was a two-story hotel with L-shaped wings, according to TxDOT.
“We looked at historic maps and discovered this was the location of what was called the Sartin Hotel,” Hanselka said.
Hanselka said they were allowed more access to survey the area in 2019, and they found iron artifacts where Cook’s blacksmith shop would have stood. The shop was across from the Sartin Hotel.
“Around that time, we had small excavations and did more background research and discovered that there was a blacksmith shop site on that side that was owned by a formerly enslaved man,” Hanselka said.
Archaeologists did a full excavation at the Sartin Hotel and Cook’s blacksmith shop sites during the winter of 2020–21.
Douglas Boyd, a senior archaeologist at Stantec, said Kring was brought to help identify and describe blacksmithing artifacts and residue.
Who was Tom Cook?
Cook was a blacksmith in Bolivar and lived with his wife, Lethia, and children. According to records, Cook was enslaved when he was brought to Tarrant County from South Carolina in 1857.
Cook became a free man on June 19, 1865, and may have lived in Tarrant County during Emancipation.
According to TxDOT, Cook may have arrived in Bolivar by 1872. In 1882, he purchased the Bolivar lot that would become the location of his blacksmith shop.
Cook died in Denton County on Jan. 5, 1898, and is buried in the Knox Cemetery near Bolivar.
Clark said he was able to visit the gravesite and took a photo with his daughter at the site. He said seeing the gravesite got to him since it was the closest he would be to his ancestor.
Finding Cook’s descendants
Boyd said that Cook’s family ended up living in Quakertown and that his family resided there when Black families were displaced from the community in 1922. The Cook family then moved to the Southeast Denton area.
Boyd said with the help of Denton County Office of History and Culture staff and others, they were able to find Cook’s descendants who resided in Denton.
“So we have four generations of descendants that we know of right here in Denton,” Boyd said. “And so the history is certainly relevant to all of the Black community here in Denton.”
Clark and other descendants were invited to visit the excavation to learn more about Cook.
“I had to see — I wanted to see it myself,” Clark said. “I was already somewhat blacksmithing — I was making blades, knives. But this was a deeper step — it was also a connection with quite a history that was part of my family I didn’t know anything about.”
Being a self-taught blacksmith, Clark decided to speak with Kring to understand more about the craft.
Kring is a blacksmithing instructor at Dallas College Brookhaven Campus, which led Clark to take classes with him.
While the excavation is finished, Hanselka said the academic work is just beginning.
“We’re done in the field, but the analysis and the report writing is going to take years,” Hanselka said.
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