[gentle music]
- John Paul Huguley: The great thing
about style and architecture, all throughout America,
is there's unique individual areas
that developed through the craftsmen themselves.
[metal clanking]
When you think about Charleston,
the first thing that comes to mind is usually ironwork.
Each craftsman will have their own signature.
Mr. Simmons has very much a signature,
and it's been amazing to watch
the amount of people who come to Charleston
to see his ironwork,
to actually touch it and see his details.
Mr. Simmons is an icon of Charleston.
[gentle music]
[metal clanking]
[jazzy vocalization]
- I think because, you know, Mr. Simmons live so long,
working in the shop closed-in,
working around this coal for years,
and he's like 98 years old.
So there gotta be some kind of potential benefit
of burning coal. [laughs]
He could take from something that he loved
and went very, very, very far with the passion of his trade.
And that's what really inspires me the most,
because I feel like I have the passion
to maybe pursue the dream that, like he had.
- Philip Simmons says his parents sent him to Charleston
at age of about nine for a good education.
So one day he was passing, going on to the Buist School,
he saw this shop, all the hot,
the sparks were flying, the horse was kicking up.
And Mr. Simmons often talk about the excitement
in the blacksmith shop that really intrigued him.
He went to the shop to work, asked Peter Simmons for a job.
Peter Simmons told him, "Boy, you're too young.
"The horse will kick you over the moon.
Come back when you turn 13."
That Thursday, he turned 13.
That Friday, he was in that shop.
[metal clanking]
- Mr. Simmons left school at the age of 13,
and he served an apprenticeship, much like people
have done probably for thousands of years.
Start out with simple work, start out putting tools away,
fixing wagons and carts.
This was work that the community needed.
And Mr. Simmons was serving that market.
Later on, as he begins to see the tides of change,
he makes a conscious decision to move into ornamental work.
[gentle music]
- So that's when Jack Krawcheck, the clothier
on King Street came to him and asked him to make a gate.
That's why I call it divine intervention.
He said, "Mr. Krawcheck, I never made no gate.
I do horseshoes and blacksmith stuff."
Jack Krawcheck told him, "Well, bend the horseshoe,
bend the iron the same way you bend the horseshoes."
- As the story goes, Mr. Simmons,
I think, was a little reluctant,
but ultimately used his skill to start developing something
that he had seen.
And he picked up on that beautiful scroll
that we all are fascinated with.
And he developed that as his signature.
- He said that he learned that style
from the old German gatemakers here in Charleston,
but of course, Christopher Werner was a German.
[gentle music]
If you were to see that gate, if you cry easy, you will cry.
You would cry because it's so beautiful.
- As he got increasingly comfortable doing his own thing,
stylistically, he begins to employ low country motifs.
That would include things like the Heron form
that he's very famous for.
These are not traditional motifs in Charleston.
[gentle music] [birds chirping]
- Joseph Pringle: He started working with iron
at an early age.
So he knew how to shift that iron
or what to do to shift the iron to get what he wanted.
He said, "You can't make two of them alike.
Go out, nature ain't make two leaves alike."
And he said, "That's the way nature is,"
so that's the way he does his work.
He get a lot of his ideas from nature.
Well, Mr. Simmons is my cousin.
I started working with him when I was about 13 years old.
He built the shop in '67.
Like, we got some stuff back here that's over 100 years old.
It's junk to other people, but it's material to me.
In order to make those things that he made,
the way he made it, you have to be an artist.
'Cause it come from you, come from your head, your brain.
He had it from within.
[gentle music]