Charles Fuller

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The lust for independent
work finally brought this
artist to the mountains.

The Rise of New America

Home
The prime movers have already moved.

"Despite what you might have heard, I was never a nuclear physicist before becoming a blacksmith," Charles Fuller admitted as he leaned against a 50-pound trip hammer in his shop in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. "But people keep choosing to paint me that way, I suppose for dramatic effect." On close inspection, it was also abundantly clear he was neither Santa Claus, despite a blizzard of a beard and a roseate nose, nor Popeye, despite his bulging forearms.

"The truth is," he continued, "I was a mechanic—formally, a mechanical maintenance supervisor—at a nuclear power plant in Florida. A cut above a nuclear janitor, for sure, but by no means a physicist."

An allied truth is that the life change of 45-year-old Charles Fuller from urban to rural and high-tech to low is as dramatic as if he had indeed walked from a career in nuclear physics.

"First of all, my wife, Patti, and I got to driving up to Tennessee with our two daughters whenever we had the chance, just for the mountains and woodlands. Second, we found that these chances were fewer and fewer. Your life isn't your own when you work at a nuclear plant. Something always goes wrong—pump seals rupture or steam valves fail—meaning I had to fix it to keep the operation from shutting down. I often needed to live at the plant for weeks on end. The money was terrific, but so was the pressure."

Then, in 1974, Fuller read an ad in MOTHER EARTH NEWS describing a basic blacksmithing school in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Could this be the way out? He enrolled, emerging four weeks later armed with the rudiments of a new skill, albeit a somewhat anachronistic one. Amazingly, before another month passed he chanced on a want ad in a Tennessee newspaper: Silver Dollar City, a theme park in Pigeon Forge, required a blacksmith.

"I told them I was just a beginner," he recalls, "but I must have looked the part. Since I was also reasonably articulate, they offered me the job." The park, an evocation of village life in the 1870s, not only liked his looks and amiability, but liked the nuclear connection as well. "Management evidently felt that such a contrast between past and present would prove highly promotable," he says. "They were right."

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