My Fisher anvil was found in a shed in the late 1980's.  It is clearly a 400 lb model which is evident from the "40" that is cast into the front leg of the anvil.  Fisher commonly stamped their anvils with their weight often dropping the last digit from the number.  Many of the anvils sold by Fisher went to the U.S. Government.  My anvil is such an example.   On the back side of the anvil, you can still faintly read stamped into the body the words "U.S. Government" and a serial number.  Perhaps this anvil served in a Navy ship yard or even on board a sailing vessel - who knows.  What is most remarkable is that it managed to survive until this day, especially when you consider the number of anvils that were melted down during WWII to help supply the need for war materials.  At any rate, it is now safe with me.

Below is a story I posted several years ago about how I managed to acquire this monster of an anvil - it is all true (really!).

Back in my high school days, I had a job where  I was working in the afternoons and evenings at a local auto parts store.  They had a nice big store in town and a real small store in one of the surrounding communities.  On Wednesday afternoon, they sent me down to the branch store because the person who ran it took Wednesday afternoons off.

Now the branch store was in this real little community way out in the country.  The store was housed in this old gas station.  It looked like it came right off of the Andy Griffith Show - old run down looking place with a lot of character.  Now, most of the folks at the main store could not stand to have to go out and work the branch store but myself, being one who liked old thing, kind of enjoyed the experience.

I guess that the best thing about working in the old store was some of the characters that traded there.  After a while, it was like working at an old general store or something - everybody knew everybody, people stopping in just to hang around - real friendly.  

One afternoon, a fellow that I had gotten to know came in and told me of this lady who lived down the road from him.  Her husband had a shop back behind the house where he was always working on old cars and such.  Seems that he had started running around on his wife and she had proof that he was shacked up with some ole girl while on a "business trip" at that very moment.

While he was gone, she went and had divorce papers drawn up so he could sign them as soon as he returned.  In the meantime, she had decided that the only way she was ever going to get any money out of the deadbeat was to sell whatever of his she could.  By the time I got over to the free-for-all flea market, most of the good stuff had been picked over pretty well.

While I was poking around, I did come across one thing that really got my attention - a huge anvil.  This anvil was by far the biggest one I had ever seen at that time.  Without even looking it over very well, I asked the lady how much she wanted for it.  She told me $75.00.  I reached into my pocket and low and behold, all I had was $50.00 - really, that was all I had.  I made her an offer for the cash I had and she agreed to the deal without hesitation (should have offered $25.00).

Now that the anvil was mine I needed a way to load the big old anvil.  Could not take a chance on leaving it there and comming back, never know when the deadbeat might show up and ruin my party. The anvil was way too heavy for me to lift, even with me and old lady, there was no way I would ever lift it into my truck. I had to come up with a plan so I started looking around.  About that time I happened to notice this fellow that I knew who was also there in the buying frenzy.  He had just bought an old International tractor from the woman and was trying on getting it cranked.  After some on the spot shade tree mechanicing,  he somehow managed to fire it off.  While I was poking around, I saw an old boom that fit onto a tractor 3-point hitch.  The lady agreed to me using it and the friend who was the proud new owner of the tractor was kind of wanting to check out the hydraulics on his tractor anyway.

We hitched up the tractor and with a found piece of chain lifted the anvil onto the back of my truck.  I then took out of there as fast as I could before this deal went bad!

When I got home, I started to look the anvil over real good.  There was a casting of a eagle with spread wings on one side.  I had remembered reading something in one of my old blacksmith books (Practical Blacksmithing) about some different brands of anvils and went to the house to look it up.  There was a copy of an old ad in the back showing an anvil with the same eagle logo on the side.  The Fisher and Norris Eagle Anvil Works from Trenton, N.J.  In fact, there was even a nice write up in the book about the history of this same outfit and how they made the best anvils around.  It also had stamped on the side of the anvil US Government and a Gov. serial number. Must have been government surplus at some time or another. Cast into one of the legs the number 40 in raised numbers. Some time later, me and several friends managed to lift it up and set onto a borrowed set of platform scales.  Thing weighed in a tad over 400 lbs.  Sometime after that, I did see one that was larger - a 600 pounder.  It was in a museum in New Mexico.

A couple of weeks later, guy I knew stopped in the store and asked me if I had heard about the lady selling all of her husbands stuff.  I told him that I did hear something about it.  He then went on and on about how disgusted he was because he had heard about this huge anvil down there.  By the time he had gotten there it was gone.  I just smiled, shook my head and said "what a shame".

e-mail: krucker@friendlycity.net