Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith” first appeared in The Knickerbocker in November 1840. It begins “Under a spreading chestnut-tree.” The smith works “Week in, week out, from morn till night,” and “His brow is wet with honest sweat.” At the end of each day: “Something attempted, something done, / Has earned a night’s repose.”
On his daily walk down Brattle Street in Cambridge, Longfellow passed the shop of the village blacksmith, Dexter Pratt. The chestnut tree was later cut down. On Longfellow’s seventy-second birthday, February 27, 1879, the children of Cambridge gave him an armchair made from its wood.