One of the shop”s most recent projects was the functional art bike racks recently installed in front of Gracie”s Barbecue and the Victory Stores on Virginia Street in downtown Vallejo.
Like Uebner, he said he mostly enjoys creating things. Vallejo native Lew Cook, 74, who said he caught the blacksmithing bug in Vallejo High School welding class, has worked with Uebner off and on for more than 25 years. I guess he wanted to show him what he could do.” “Then, (Gus Uebner) went to lunch, and when he got back, the guy had taken a pair of tongs, heated them and hammered them into the anvil. “One time a guy who was from Kansas came by looking for a job and my dad said there wasn”t one,” Uebner said. Carl Uebner took to blacksmithing from the start, and learned the craft from the man he considers his father, and several others, he said. He worked on California”s early 1920s Feather River Dam project, shoeing horses, and then made his way to Vallejo, to work for Coronando”s Three-Mile-House at the convergence of what is now Lewis Brown Road, Broadway Street and Highway 37.Īt first, most of the work, besides making and applying horseshoes, involved constructing iron tires and tools like plowshares.Ĭarl Uebner said he and his widowed mother moved to Vallejo in the 1940s from San Francisco, where she met and married Gus Uebner. The son of a German shoemaker, Gus Uebner immigrated to the United States in 1908, at age 18, having already apprenticed to a blacksmith there, Carl Uebner said. “I remember Byerrum”s son had this tall ladder in the corner of the door, because that”s where they used to bring in the horses, and, in case one of them got too wild, you”d have to run up the ladder to get out of the way,” Uebner said. The 66-year-old article mentions how heavy machinery had already replaced the horse in the modern blacksmith shop, and that Uebner”s was already “the only veteran smithy left in business here.”īack then, horses and the equipment associated with them, were the smithy”s bread and butter, Carl Uebner said.
In fact, the forge upon which Mark Uebner”s grandfather is shown working in that article is still functioning in the same spot, he said. He”d tell about California history 100 years back and how he”d come down from Sonoma and see coyotes and other wild animals in the high grass along the way.”Īnd while much has changed around the smithy shop, little inside has. “He used to sit here while I was shoeing his horse or fixing his cart and never quit talking. “He sure liked horses,” Gus Uebner reminisced in the story. Platon Vallejo, the son of city founder Gen. The story noted that among Gus Uebner”s regular clients in the early days was Dr. The elder Uebner was 57 at the time, only slightly older than his grandson, Mark Uebner, now 51, a Sacramento area resident who learned the trade at his father”s knee. Gus Uebner died in 1964, at age 74, but by 1940 Uebner & Byerrum was the last blacksmith shop in Vallejo.Ī December 1947 Times-Herald feature on the elder Uebner and his shop noted that his once considerable competition fell away after various factors made the neighborhood smithy nearly obsolete. Several years after founding the blacksmith shop, Gus Uebner took on a partner, Charles Byerrum, who retired in the late 1960s, leaving the operation to Carl Uebner, he said. “We still do some of that, but now it”s mostly metal work of different types.” “When my father first started here, cars were in their infancy, and most of the work was horseshoes and wagon wheels,” said Uebner, a Napa resident who”s been married 50 years and has three grown children. While some of the tools, methods and assignment types have changed in the blacksmithing industry over the years, much has also stayed the same, Uebner said. The creek is no longer visible from the shop. He and his father, Gus Uebner, watched the city grow up around them through that open portal, at first at a slower, horse-and-buggy pace and now at the much faster, many horsepower speed of today”s horseless carriages. Highway 40, one once saw framed a view of Austin Creek and little else, Uebner said. Gazing through Uebner & Byerrum”s large front door overlooking what had been Transrcontinental U.S. Meanwhile, time marches by the shop that time itself has nearly forgotten. As he has nearly every day for most of his 78 years, Carl Uebner still comes to work in the blacksmith shop his stepfather founded on Vallejo”s Broadway Street (then 205 Napa Road) in 1915, though he says he”ll soon retire.
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