Annie Holtz gets up at 4 a.m. every Friday to pursue her dream.
In the predawn darkness, she fills her car with zinnias, sunflowers and other blooms and foliage harvested from her yard on the southern fringe of Cook County and hits the road, delivering bouquets to doorsteps on a circuit ranging from Rogers Park on Chicago’s North Side to Homewood and Flossmoor, getting back home before 8 a.m. to jump online for her regular job at a tech firm.
After work, she might head out to join her husband, Dennis Holtz, to hammer metal into useful objects at the coal-fired forge the couple installed in their garage.
It’s a dream Annie and Dennis have been working toward together since before they got married in 2017, but really started in earnest a year later when they moved from a Chicago apartment into their home on a 1.5 acre lot in the south suburbs.
“Before we met, we separately had interests in farming and folk craft-type things,” Annie said. So it was natural that once they bought a house, “We were like, ‘should we make our garage into a smithy? Let’s do it!’ We’re not going to have kids so let’s spend some money and buy a forge and some tools.”
“It was like a midlife crisis,” Dennis added with a laugh.
Less than a year after moving in, the couple started their business, Wrought Iron Farm, setting up at farmers markets and art fairs to sell things they make and grow.
Both have had encounters with blacksmithing in their early-life wanderings. Annie was hooked after participating in a demonstration at a historical site in Minnesota, creating, appropriately, an iron hook.
“It was awesome and it was always in the back of my mind to incorporate that somehow,” she said.
For Dennis, who grew up in Oak Lawn with a bone disability that deteriorated his hip joints, it was one of his “eureka moments,” sudden realizations that he had the ability to create cool things. All it took was some creativity and effort. Demonstrative internet videos helped too.
“I started watching videos, and was like, I can be a blacksmith!” he said.
He built a forge out of a brake drum and an anvil out of a piece of railroad track and got to work.
“I started out more melting steel than forging anything, but it was still awesome to be out in my driveway throwing sparks everywhere, and having the neighbors out there watching me and thinking I was crazy,” he said. “That got put on hold for four years or so, then when we bought our house we turned our garage into a blacksmith shop and jumped into it head on.”
“That’s how we do everything,” Annie added. “We decide we’re going to do it, and then we just do it full force.”
So when 10 acres of agricultural land in Beecher became available, they jumped at the chance to expand their operation, purchasing the property a couple months ago.
It’s another step toward achieving their dream through a plan that’s been evolving for a few years.
“When we were planning our future, it always involved a lot of land and growing,” Annie said. “The vision was that we’d sustain ourselves and grow everything for ourselves and do all the crafts and somehow make money out of that.
“It’s refined itself to a couple of things, at least for now.”
The flower bouquet subscription service is one of those things that has been going well, Annie said. In fact, it sold out this summer, and they’ll be able to expand it with the additional land in years to come.
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“It feels like a hustle right now,” she said. “But there’s a lot more interest, so I can see it really expanding and becoming one of our main things.”
But the ideal of sustainability remains an important part of what they do and what they plan. It’s not just being able to support themselves, but an overarching desire to help the world a little in the process.
“We’re really into sustainable agriculture, doing things without harmful chemicals and adding more to the soil than we take from it,” Annie said. “We try to incorporate that into everything we do.”
To that end, much of the material they use in their blacksmithing projects is reused or repurposed, such as including old wheelbarrow handles into a newly forged garden shovel, for example.
“Those are made of good wood,” Dennis said, “usually hickory.”
He’s also taken old carpenter files that might end up in a landfill and turned them into kitchen knives. And he makes regular trips to a nearby scrap yard looking for metal pieces that cry out to be turned into something new.
Sometimes they’ll be driving and see scrap metal on the side of the road, “and it’s ‘Annie jump out and grab that metal thing that’s on the shoulder,'” Annie said.
“That’s happened several times,” Dennis said. “One time I was backing up on the shoulder of the expressway to get a chunk of metal I saw.”
They purchase new materials too, especially for special projects such as an impressive “Damascus steel” knife he created using an ancient forging process involving 130 layers of metal that sold for $600, he said.
They take pride in all of the products from the forge. Not only do they hammer useful items there, the forge is a time machine of sorts that goes back to a period when we weren’t surrounded by junk.
“I love to create something that has that object permanence, where someone will have this thing they can pass from generation to generation and it will hold up,” Dennis said. “It’s not something that was mass produced somewhere and made with poor materials. It’s made to last. And it gives me a sense of pride that after I’m gone and forgotten about, something I made could carry on.”
They can’t start working on their new acreage in Beecher until the current tenant farmer harvests a corn crop, but they’re eager to enter the next phase for Wrought Iron Farm.
There will be more flowers and other garden produce, and a pole barn to house their blacksmith, woodworking and glass blowing workshops, and maybe some sheep or alpacas where Annie can source wool for her weaving projects.
And there’s still plenty to dream about, beyond that, even. Annie and Dennis have ideas ranging from gatherings to share their maker skills with others in an informal format at their new farm. Another ambitious idea would create an opportunity to bring police and youth together to work on blacksmithing or woodworking projects, helping them to forge human connections and see each other with mutual respect.
For now, they’re busy growing and making things, showcasing their efforts at markets on online via their YouTube channel, social media pages — where they schedule livestreams of their projects every Thursday evening — and on their website at wroughtironfarm.com.
“It’s so cool it’s finally taking shape with this new land,” Annie said. “You have these ideas and some don’t get beyond the planning stage. Now we’re moving forward. We’re getting there at least.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].