Owl Blacksmith Shop
a.k.a. Lee Cotter's Blacksmith Shop
208 W. Rainey, Weatherford, OKThe Owl/Lee Cotter Blacksmith Shop is significant for two reasons. As a father/son enterprise, it has carried on for 70 years with no important change either in the nature of the business itself or in the appearance of the physical plant in which it has operated. Additionally, the shop represents an authentic cultural tie with the past ... an uninterrupted, 70-plus-year-old plying of a skilled trade, once so all-important as to be found almost everywhere, but now, thanks to changing commercial conditions, fast approaching the status of a lost art.
Lee Cotter Sr. bought the Owl shop in 1913, just 15 years after Weatherford was established. How long the "Attabury Boys" had operated it before 1913 is not known; conceivably it could have been since 1898. Lee Cotter Jr. learned blacksmithing from his father and has run the shop since his father's death. Throw-away plowshares, portable welding trucks, and other developments have greatly reduced the demand for blacksmiths, of course. (Cotter can remember when his father would have as many as 400 plowshares lined up for repair ... at 25 cents a share.) But Cotter has adapted his skills to the changing needs of the community. "If Lee Cotter can't fix something," they say in Custer County, "it can't be fixed."
Cotter lives nearby and continues his trade in the same false-fronted frame shop his father took over in 1913. The building is little changed, outside or in. Still in place and in service to the community are the original forge, jackhammer, anvil, and other tools of the trade ... along with the skills of the blacksmithing trade, passed along from father to son. Blacksmith shop and blacksmithing, building, and trade ... Lee Cotter preserves a tie with the past that embraces the greater part of the 85-year existence of the Weatherford community itself.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.