One of Baltimore’s oldest businesses, the Joseph Kavanagh Co., will close later this year after 16 decades of shaping copper and bending steel into products for homemakers, manufacturers, artists and artisans — pots and pans and pitchers, huge tanks for brewers and distillers, handlebars for motorcycles, pipes for industry, abstract sculptures, artsy bike racks and even the giant rims of Ferris wheels.
A long line of Kavanaghs have plied this trade — with a break for some lucrative bootlegging during Prohibition — since shortly after the Civil War.
I once tried to tally all the events that came to pass since that summer day in 1866 when Joseph Kavanagh, an Irish immigrant from County Wexford, set up shop as a coppersmith in Baltimore’s Jones Falls Valley. I came up with a partial accounting: Twenty-three recessions, five financial panics, a destructive flood and devastating fire, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and at least two pandemics.
In the 1880s, Joe Kavanagh went to New York and put his grateful immigrant hands to work on the assembly of the copper-clad Statue of Liberty. His six generations of descendants lived through the invention of the telephone, the automobile, radio and television. They worked in the heyday of American manufacturing and, eventually, a global economy. They lived through World War I and World War II, the Cold War, the space race, the march for women’s suffrage and the push for civil rights, the advent of computers and the dawn of the internet. Descendants of Joe Kavanagh worked in metal all through those years — first in copper and eventually in steel, aluminum and other alloys…