Jonathan Shelby Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

On the road west of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the eighteenth century, a traveller with a lame horse or a broken wagon tire could hardly go wrong in asking for the forge of Jonathan Shelby Proctor. It sat at the crook of a creek where the Conestoga wagons stopped to water, a low stone shop with a chimney that was seldom cold, and inside it for a quarter of a century worked a large, silent, unmarried man whose hammer could be heard a mile off. He was born in Lancaster in 1725, of the Proctor blood on his mother's side, and died there in 1780 of a fever, aged fifty-five. The White Ledger that his mother's family kept remembers him as its smith, a title that carried more weight than it sounds. His father, Jonathan Shelby, born in 1703 and dead in 1742, was a militiaman and a farmer of small means, the sort of man who mustered with the county company in his one good coat and drank his cider at the Sign of the Hat. His mother, Florence Tilton Proctor, born in 1703 and dead in 1754, was a milliner who had kept her own family name when she married, according to the custom by which the Proctor surname passed down through the women. She set up a millinery in the front room of the house, taking in ribbons, straw, lace and buckram for the Lancaster ladies, and sent her son out to deliver bonnet boxes in a handcart. There was also a sister, Naomi Proctor, born in 1727, two years younger and every bit as stubborn, who was his lifelong companion, his housekeeper in later years, and the only person who could tell him to eat his supper and be obeyed. Lancaster, in his childhood, was a new town, laid out in the 1730s on a grid around a market square by a proprietor of the Penn family, and it was growing fast. German and Scots-Irish settlers came into it by the hundred, and around it lay the Quaker farms of the Pennsylvania countryside, with their stone barns and orderly orchards, and the river landings of the Susquehanna where flour, iron and hemp were loaded for Philadelphia. The place was known for gunsmiths, wagon-makers, tanners and ironmasters, and it was a town of many tongues and many churches, Friends, Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites and Presbyterians all sharing the same muddy streets. The Friends' plain meeting houses stood among the farms, and from the Quaker neighbours he took a taste for plain speaking and a suspicion of ornament. The militia, oddly, was the province's afterthought, since the Quaker assembly disliked funding it, and the father's company was more a matter of neighbourly obligation than of professional soldiering. Jonathan Shelby's death in 1742 left the household in a difficulty, and it was Florence who resolved it. The boy, then seventeen, had already shown a talent for iron, and she apprenticed him to a Lancaster smith named Herr, a Swiss-German of great bulk and small speech, who had a forge near the market and a reputation for making the best axes between Philadelphia and the mountains. For five years Jonathan learned bellows, tongs, the colour of iron at each heat, the welding of steel to iron, the shaping of a plough share, the tempering of a chisel. Herr also taught him to build the long rifle that Pennsylvania gunsmiths were then making, a piece with a slender barrel of forty-odd inches, patchbox in the butt and a fine, sweet balance, and he became competent enough to forge barrels of his own. At twenty-two he opened his own shop on the Conestoga road. The White Ledger household came into his life through his mother's line. Florence, who had been raised in the Yorkist tradition of the Proctors and carried a small key on a ribbon round her neck, took her son aside one night after his apprenticeship and showed him the book kept in a locked drawer of the milliner's counter. Proctor hunters passing through Lancaster, on their way between Virginia and the Susquehanna, came to her back door for a night's rest, and they needed things that neither a gunsmith nor a farrier could supply alone: a horse shod in a hurry, a spike ground fine, a silver-tipped bolt cast to a pattern. Jonathan supplied them. He forged crossbow heads and stake points of quenched steel for men who took his work without asking where he had learned it. His speciality, and the thing that lifted him from the ranks of village smiths, was a hinge and bolt for doors that could not be broken from the outside, and he fitted several of them in the cellars of Proctor safe houses from Lancaster to Reading. He was a big man, six feet and several inches, with arms like tree limbs, a leather apron burned full of small holes, and a beard that in later years turned from black to a soot-flecked grey. He spoke little, and when he spoke it was in a slow, level Pennsylvania voice. He was gentle with animals, and horses from three counties came to him willingly. The neighbours called him honest, which in the trade of ironmongery was high praise. He never married. In a small town this was noted and discussed, and more than one widow with a farm to protect took an interest, but the smith had an odd calm about the matter, and his sister put it about, without much conviction, that he was married to his anvil. Whether he had once loved someone who was lost to the French war, as a persistent rumour said, the family never confirmed. The wars with France on the frontier reached him in the 1750s and 1760s, when Braddock's disaster of 1755 sent the Pennsylvania border into panic and settlers streamed back from the Susquehanna and the Juniata. He shod cavalry horses, repaired the ironwork of provision wagons, and turned out hatchets and tomahawks by the hundred for the provincial companies. It was also in those years, when the country was full of frightened people and stranger things in the dark, that the Proctors of the White Ledger leaned hardest on their smith. A hunter riding through in the autumn of 1756 recorded in the Ledger that the smith of Lancaster had made him a new stake and a new stirrup in one night, and that the stirrup had saved his life. There is no tally of the smith's own, since he never went out. The Revolution found him fifty and stout, no longer able to work the great bellows all day, but eager to help. He forged pike heads, wagon axles and camp kettles for the Continental cause, and his sister Naomi ran the shop ledger while he worked. Lancaster became a centre of manufacture and a place of confinement for prisoners, and he spent long hours in the shop through those years. In the summer of 1780, after a hot week of heavy work, he took a fever, one of the bilious summer fevers that the county's low ground bred in wet seasons, and he died in the same house where he had been born, having asked only that the shop fire be kept banked. Naomi survived him and outlived the shop, and it was she who carried the White Ledger's page of his work to the next generation. She wrote on the flyleaf that her brother had made every good lock in three counties and had never once opened a door that was not his to open. That is how the Slayerverse remembers Jonathan Shelby Proctor, as the unmarried smith who shod the horses and forged the tools and stood, unseen, behind a hundred Proctor hunts.