Springfield Then and Now: W.H. Dickson blacksmith shop

W.H. Dickson was born in Tennessee in 1840 into a free black farming family. During the Civil War, he served with Texas in the Confederacy, and following the war he settled in Springfield where he first worked as a wagon maker and later as a blacksmith.

For a short period of time in the early 1890s, he worked as an undertaker and embalmer and had a blacksmith shop in the back of this building on North Fountain Avenue, shown here around 1895.