Dan Rodricks: G. Krug of Baltimore, American democracy, and keeping what works

You could mark American history on the long timeline of G. Krug & Son of Baltimore. Built by immigrants, it is said to be the oldest ironworks factory in the country. It has endured like the objects it produces — wrought iron railings and fences, gates and grates, hinges and handles, ornaments and andirons — just as the country has endured.

There is a feeling of forever in the place, starting with the worn brick floor just a few steps off West Saratoga Street.

A blacksmith named Augustus Schwatka had the big idea of establishing his own business there in 1810. At the time, the United States was only 34 years old. It had fought and won a war of independence from the British crown. James Madison was the fourth president of the new republic. More war with the empire loomed, including an attack on Fort McHenry. But Baltimore and the young nation survived.

In 1830, a man named Andrew Merker bought Schwatka’s business, offering services as a locksmith and bell hanger for the many churches under construction. That same year, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad started operations. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing thousands of Indigenous people to move west of the Mississippi River, causing great trauma and death in the process. The population of the 24 states was close to 13 million, with 2 million enslaved. In Maryland, there were about 102,000 slaves, close to one fourth of the state’s population.

In 1848, an immigrant blacksmith named Gustav Krug took a job at the ironworks on Saratoga Street. He went from journeyman to foreman to partner in the business with Merker. He was there through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

Krug took over the business after Merker’s death in 1871. There has been a Krug in charge of the ironworks ever since. Their portraits hang above a fireplace in the office, around a hand-forged wreath.

Peter Krug, the fifth generation, took me through the shop one recent morning. After the tour, upstairs and down, I concluded that no place in Baltimore has a richer feel of yesterday, so real you can touch it and come away with dust on your fingers. 

G. Krug & Son is cluttered with objects from the last century and the century before that. Krug workers reach for tools that seem like artifacts — heavy hammers, tongs, wrenches, punches and anvils shiny from use — as they forge iron into all manner of things for homes and institutions. They make new products, they restore old ones.

This is where men long ago made ornate fencing for the Basilica of the Assumption, Baltimore’s Washington Monument and Johns Hopkins Hospital. This is where, in more recent times, Krug workers restored the large iron fence around the Old Naval Hospital in Washington. 

It’s where, just the other day, Peter Krug and his employees worked on elements of a new balcony for a Baltimore rowhouse. The basic work of measuring, bending, welding, grinding and finishing has not changed much over time.

And a sense of time — the company’s time, Baltimore’s time, the nation’s time — surrounds you inside G. Krug. There have been 43 American presidencies, two world wars, recessions, depressions, epidemics and epochs of social change since Schwatka opened his blacksmith shop at 415 West Saratoga.

It is hard to move around these days without thinking about the current state of the country, given the actions of the second Trump administration. The threat to democracy is real, and millions of Americans, regarding the 47th presidency with dread and shame, see much of the social, economic and geopolitical progress of the last century being reversed. We wonder whether the country as we knew it will endure. 

These thoughts occured to me as morning light fell through the windows at G. Krug, illuminating a second-floor workshop with its wooden floor and congregation of tools. The company’s endurance is impressive. The Krugs have met the challenge of keeping what works. 

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin said in 1787, when asked what kind of government had been forged at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. 

“Democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people,” wrote the late historian Richard Beeman. “They are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people.”

What’s confusing and depressing to many of my fellow citizens — and I hear from them, in one form or another, every day — is that some 77 million Americans voted for a man who vowed to be a dictator, who, since taking office again, declared himself king and compared himself to a 19th Century emperor. 

The nation’s founders rejected monarchy. 

And so looms the test that Lincoln described at Gettysburg during the Civil War: Whether a nation conceived in liberty “can long endure.”

For all who worry about our democratic republic, I found inspiration within the brick walls of G. Krug & Son, a venerable company that has prospered in the same place, doing much the same thing, for 215 years. Some of the factory’s old spaces have been made museum-like for tour groups. But it is not a museum, not a thing of the past, but a living, working, enduring enterprise that would not have lasted without hard work, sharp minds and long devotion to craft — indeed, long devotion to an idea.