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, a line of American-made cookware created with pure, natural materials and the help from local family-owned companies. Her cookware has been featured in national and international publications such as Cooking Light, Food and Wine, Veranda, Beekman 1802, Root+Bone, Midwest Living, and many more.

One of the only female coppersmiths in America (if not the only), Sara has had a varied career, from her first job in marketing to building an award-winning wedding planning business to writing historical fiction. Her love of deep historical research led to her current work as a metalsmith of vintage and modern cookware.

Sara has been published as a contributing editor for trade magazines and recently spoke at TEDx Rapid City. Sara is also the co-founder of the American Pure Metals Guild and is an apprentice to a master tinsmith in Wisconsin, where she works with tools from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to rebuild vintage cookware and design custom work from scratch. When not working in her garage, she can be found writing historical fiction, sewing authentic clothing for reenactments of frontier days, and hosting epic historical-themed dinner parties. She lives in Port Washington, Wisconsin, with her husband and three young children.