episode 568 Making munitions filings into fin jewelry….Edward Freeman 1914
alan skeoch
april 20, 2022
This work of art is ignored lost in the back pantry of the old Freeman farm house.
…along with balls of string, buttons, lane wicks, milk caps, news clipping of poems of
Edna Jacques…and a single fine piece jewelry.
episode 568 Making munitions filings into fin jewelry….Edward Freeman 1914
FINE JEWELRY FROM ARTILLERY SHELLS BRASS FILINGS
IN an earlier episode I described how the Freeman family were burned out
of their log home in the long gone village of Krugerdorf in Northern Ontario.
They had barely enough money to buy the 25 acre farm we own today. The land
remains terrible….stones and swamps. Beautiful to look at but impossible to farm.
when they arrived in 1914.
So Edward Freeman got a job as a munitions maker in Toronto. Seems to have been
operating a metal carving lathe. Perhaps the brass nose cones on artillery shells
or the shell casings.
“What is this, mom?”, I asked when we were gutting the old farm house…removing the old
pantry and interior walls making one huge room where once there were four tiny rooms.
“That’s a brooch that your grandfather made for me in 1914.”
“Was he a jeweller?”
“Far from it. he was doing whatever he could to pay for the farm.””
“Making?”
“Making artillery shells in Toronto during the week and coming
here to the farm on Saturday and Sunday.”
‘Do you mean granddad made this brooch from bomb filings?”
alan skeoch
april 2022