Ponder Pilot Article
The Ponder Pilot
Volume 4, Number 4 Friday, April 2, 2004
The village smithy

Blacksmith has gone from shoeing horses in East Germany to forging art in Ponder.
By Stephen English
Alliance Regional Newspapers

Ponder- Art is good. Art with functionality is even better. But art with functionality and fascinating back story?

Paul Matthaus took a long road to get to Krum, Texas, and open his Lone Star Forge in Ponder.

“In 1965 I got out of high school. I lived next door to a blacksmith. I said, ‘I need a job.’ He said, ‘Come on over here Monday morning and get busy,’” Matthaus related in his deep, booming German accent.  “That’s how it started.  Four months later, we escaped to West Berlin.  I’m an escapee from Communist Germany.”

Matthaus continued to hone his craft after slipping past the Iron Curtain as a teen-ager, coming to America in 1971 and opening a shop out of an old dairy barn in Atlanta.

He moved to Texas in 1977, living first in Fort Worth and meeting Becky Johnston of Dallas seven years later. They relocated to Denton after getting married, and then moved to Krum.

Matthaus completed renovations on a 100-year-old building next to Ranchman’s Café in Ponder, and opened the Lone Star Forge.  “We found it last fall, this old place, and we’ve remodeled the whole thing.  There’s a lot of history here,” Matthaus said.

Matthaus said 60 to 80 people showed up to his open house March 27.

“He is an artistic blacksmith who has been creating pieces from metal for 40 years,” his wife, Becky, said. something missing here items like candleholders to large furniture pieces like tables and wall sculptures.” Photographs of Matthaus’s “art in iron” can be found at www.lonestarforge.com.

His new shop includes a gas forge and a coal-burning forge, in which he heats iron to create everything from abstract works of art to hang on walls, door and window panels with different motifs, and different styles of crosses, to utilitarian items such as fireplace tools, lamp tables and fruit

But art was not the first task that Matthaus was put to when he began as a young blacksmith. “I shoed horses in East Germany, fixed farmers’ equipment,” he said. “I got into art when I came over here, and I’m back in full swing again.”

Though much of his work has functionality, he considers himself an artistic ironworker now. “No more shoeing horses,” he said, laughing. “That’s hard work.. I’m 64. So I’ve