Many objects made in the blacksmith shop got no special decoration after forging. Nails, horseshoes, and clothing hooks may have been scrubbed with a wire brush and put to use. But
some items received fancier treatment. Cooking forks, spatula, and ladles often received “whitesmithing.” This means the metal surface was smoothed with a file and given a bright, shiny finish.
Items that were going to be decorated in that fashion needed special treatment. The smith would carefully forge the item to as close as possible to the finished surface. Then time was spent with a succession of files shaping the iron. The traditional saying is that the smith needed to “forge thick and file thin.” He needed to allow enough material for filing. But not too much extra metal, as you could spend hours filing the surface. So a related saying admonished that “five minutes at the Anvil saves half an hour at the bench!"
Cooking hardware, like spatulas, was often filed smooth. The spatula was forged to rough shape and filed to a smooth shape and surface. We have examples in the shop of a freshly forged spatula, newly forged spatula, and spatula from past seasons.
My 9 year old son recently had his school Spring Vacation. I invited him to come to work with me for the day. We put him right to work with chores that a boy would be doing in 1845. He started his day assisting the farmers with letting out the livestock, shoveling manure, and collecting eggs. Then he came to the Field Blacksmith Shop to haul coal, bring in firewood, and sweep the floor. Later in the afternoon he joined the farmers again to help cultivate the hop field. Zeb the horse is pulling the cultivator, Marieanne Coursen is driving the horse, and Devon is guiding the cultivator. When he returned home we found he had dirt in his boots, in his pockets, and in his hair. He then asked, “When can we do that again?”
Files are used to cut and smooth steel down to size and to change the shape of a surface. Files are made from a bar of high carbon steel. The sharp teeth are used to remove metal from an object.
The door is simply a steel plate with legs. The most interesting part of it is the handle, which reflects the door handles used within the house. I am looking forward to seeing the return to use of a hearth and oven over 180 years old. The Lippitt Farm staff are eager to put it back into use for demonstrations. They make bread, biscuits, pies, and tarts. If I am really lucky, they will bake a cake and share it with the blacksmith! 
A nail header is an iron bar with a tapered square or rectangular hole in it. It is used to hold the tapered square nail while the blacksmith flattens a head on the top. This finishes the nail. Since nails are made in many different thicknesses we make a variety of nail headers to hold them. 
Nail headers of many sizes and style are used in the shop. We are making one in a late Colonial/early American style. It is made with a body of wrought iron and a smaller cap of hard steel welded to the face. The face is then punched with the hole needed for finishing the nail. We have about a dozen nail headers and many more used to make bolts and other hardware.
My admiration, however, is extended to some of our smallest neighbors at the farm. The sparrows have claimed the barn as their own, despite all our efforts to displace them. They live here despite being unwanted by the farmers and pursued by the barn cat. Cheeky and boisterous, they squabble, chirp, and swoop around the farmers as they fork hay into the loft. Flights of sparrows launch dramatic air-born raids on any spilled chicken feed, and even hang upside down by their feet from the corn shocks drying in the barn. These bold little thieves cheerfully raid the barn for food, take shelter from storms under its eaves, and seem to watch our busy actions with amusement. 
