One of Baltimore’s oldest businesses, the Joseph Kavanagh Co., will close later this year after 16 decades of shaping copper and bending steel into products for homemakers, manufacturers, artists and artisans — pots and pans and pitchers, huge tanks for brewers and distillers, handlebars for motorcycles, pipes for industry, abstract sculptures, artsy bike racks and even the giant rims of Ferris wheels.
A long line of Kavanaghs have plied this trade — with a break for some lucrative bootlegging during Prohibition — since shortly after the Civil War.
I once tried to tally all the events that came to pass since that summer day in 1866 when Joseph Kavanagh, an Irish immigrant from County Wexford, set up shop as a coppersmith in Baltimore’s Jones Falls Valley. I came up with a partial accounting: Twenty-three recessions, five financial panics, a destructive flood and devastating fire, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and at least two pandemics.
In the 1880s, Joe Kavanagh went to New York and put his grateful immigrant hands to work on the assembly of the copper-clad Statue of Liberty. His six generations of descendants lived through the invention of the telephone, the automobile, radio and television. They worked in the heyday of American manufacturing and, eventually, a global economy. They lived through World War I and World War II, the Cold War, the space race, the march for women’s suffrage and the push for civil rights, the advent of computers and the dawn of the internet. Descendants of Joe Kavanagh worked in metal all through those years — first in copper and eventually in steel, aluminum and other alloys.
Joe Kavanagh started the business by shaping copper into common household products. But just two years after opening his shop, a deadly summer flood, known as the Black Friday Flood of 1868, pushed him out of the Jones Falls Valley. Kavanagh moved his coppersmith operation to 708 E. Lombard St., and there he thrived, trading as Joseph Kavanagh Co. Other Kavanaghs, brothers and nephews, came into the business.
In February 1904, a massive fire left most of downtown in ruins, including Kavanagh’s Lombard Street shop.
So Uncle Joe and his five nephews opened a new place on the southeast side of the city, in a brick building at Central Avenue and East Pratt Street. They became known, well beyond Baltimore, as skilled and reliable manufacturers of copper tanks for distillers and brewers. The company later transitioned into bending and rolling metals, particularly pipe, and settled on Central Avenue for a century.
In 2004, the Kavanaghs moved to a shop off North Point Road in Dundalk.
The current Joe Kavanagh — he’s a great-great grand nephew of “Original Joe” Kavanagh — has been running the family business with his sister, Ann. Two nephews, Patrick and Paul, are the last in the long line of skilled metal workers going back to “Original Joe.”
According to the current Joe Kavanagh, business has been dropping over the last decade. At one point, he says, he had to ask two of his best workers to take a pay cut; they left the shop in 2014. The company’s billing dropped to half what it had been a decade earlier. Joe and Ann took pay cuts and took on debt.
I first spoke to Joe Kavanagh during Donald Trump’s first term as president. In 2018, Trump placed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. At his shop in Dundalk, Joe Kavanagh found the tariffs arbitrary and unsettling for a business vulnerable to the slightest tremors in the global economy and the metals market.
Of course, arbitrariness is a hallmark of both Trump presidencies, something in direct conflict with the way successful businesses operate.
“In December [2017], we had our best month in five years,” Kavanagh told me when I interviewed him for my Baltimore Sun column. “We had our best January in four years. And February was pretty good. Then March came, and, you know, all it takes is the word, ‘tariffs.’ The phone stopped ringing in May. June was bad. I started sweating it again. … We’re a small family business. Small companies need steady work, lulls are bad. When prices go up, projects get delayed and that affects us. You can’t do this at 25 percent [more] all of a sudden. That’s an arbitrary increase.”
Perhaps the biggest factor in the company’s decline — the advance of technology. Pipe bending has largely transitioned to computer control, an upgrade that Joe Kavanagh says his company could not afford.
“The machines that do what we do are better now, and I can’t compete with that,” Joe says. “You don’t really have to be as skilled, and I’m not knocking anybody that can run those machines because it’s a whole different thing. But you don’t have to have the touch, the feel for it.
“And, of course, the tariffs have not helped,” Joe adds, echoing the concern he raised in the first Trump term.
So the Kavanagh building, at 8100 Lynhurst Road, has been sold and the clock is ticking on the last five months of a company that goes back 160 years.
Few Baltimore businesses can claim that kind of longevity. G. Krug & Son, on West Saratoga Street, is the oldest continuously operating blacksmith shop in the country. It has been producing ornamental ironwork at the same location since 1810.
Joe Kavanagh has been digging through family history and discovered traditions — many of his ancestors were talented musicians — and tragedies: A Kavanagh was killed in a train wreck during a business trip to Connecticut in 1903, another was killed in an industrial accident in Chicago in 1920, another died from malaria in Panama in 1924.
Joe also learned that, during Prohibition (1920-1933), the company made some adjustments to its business model. “Prohibition took away 50 percent of the work of making tanks for distilleries. Nobody was brewing beer or making whiskey,” Joe says. “So what did they do? They did some bootlegging.”
According to Joe, some Kavanagh coppersmiths turned to illegally distilling whiskey in the big shop on Central Avenue. “They were cranking it out, and they were making money,” Joe says. “I could tell you, if we’re ever in the old building on Central Avenue, where the still was.” His grandfather, Eddie, drove an Indian motorcycle to distribute booze to Baltimore customers.
After Prohibition, the metals business picked up again and the Kavanaghs went back to their traditional crafts, though, oddly, the local demand for Kavanagh whiskey, delivered by motorcycle, remained for several years.
Eddie and his wife, Anna, had two sons — one a jitterbug champ, the other a duckpin bowling champ, Navy veteran and member of the Maryland House of Delegates. The latter was Joe and Ann Kavanagh’s father, Jack. He died at age 93 in 2017, the last of the Kavanagh coppersmiths.
The closing of the company is expected to be in November. These final months are bittersweet, says Joe.
“But I am immensely thankful,” he quickly adds. “We came to America in 1849. We found a home. Six generations were able to work together and have our own thing— this thing, this shop. It’s pretty damn incredible that, through ups and downs, we’ve had this place, this shop. My family found a home here. In all the world, we came to Baltimore. We were damn lucky.”
Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com. More photos of the Kavanagh company can be found on Dan’s Facebook page.
Dan, a beautiful, yet sad story!