Tinsmith 1865 by Sara Dahmen

Tinsmith 1865 by Sara Dahmen

When her tinsmith father and brothers head West, Polish immigrant Marie Kotlarczyk has no choice but to go along. Family, after all, is family. The Dakota Territories are anything but welcoming to the Kotlarczyks, and as the months trip by, Marie must pick up the hammers she's secretly desired but also feared. When she faces the skeptical people of Flats Town, the demands of the local Army commander, and her public failures, her inner voice grows destructively, forcing Marie to decide exactly who she is and what it means to be a woman smith.

Sara Dahmen is the founder of House Copper & Cookware, an American-crafted cookware line made with pure, natural materials and with the assistance of local family-owned businesses. Sara's cookware has been published in national and international publications such as Cooking Light, Food and Wine, Veranda, Beekman 1802, Root+Bone, Midwest Living, and many more. Sara has had a diverse career, ranging from her first work in marketing to creating an award-winning wedding planning business to writing historical fiction. Sara has been featured as a contributing editor for trade journals and recently spoke at TEDx Rapid City. Her love of deep historical study led to her current profession as a metalsmith of vintage and modern cookware. Sara is also a co-founder of the American Pure Metals Guild and works as an apprentice to a professional tinsmith in Wisconsin, where she rebuilds historic cookware and creates custom work from scratch using tools from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She can be found writing historical novels, creating real costumes for reenactments of frontier days, and holding enormous historical-themed dinner parties when she's not working in her garage. Her spouse and three small children live in Port Washington, Wisconsin.