Drunken Smithy plans to open a mead hall next door pending state approval of its liquor license. Asha Prihar/Spotlight PA
Malls aren’t what they used to be — and in one corridor of the 50-year-old Lebanon Valley Mall in south-central Pennsylvania, the contrast between past and present is especially stark.
Once upon a time, Payless ShoeSource and Victoria’s Secret were neighbors in the mall.
These days, you won’t find underwear or sneakers there. Instead, the space is equipped with ax throwing lanes, a soon-to-open meadow hall, display cases filled with handmade knives and swords, and a forge where customers can learn to make items of their metal ones.
Drunken Smithy opened in the former Victoria’s Secret in 2023 and has since expanded into two adjacent storefronts.
Co-owners Greg Ramsey and Eitri Jones started the business in 2016 out of an industrial building in Palmyra. The pair met a decade ago at Milton Hershey School, where they worked as house parents. They came up with the idea for an early version of Drunken Smithy one night while drinking.
“After about 10 years of raising high school kids … it can burn you out a little bit,” Jones told PA Local. “So we were ready to move on and we thought, which is more fun? And we invented swords, making and forging.”
They decided to call it Drunken Smithy, “because your swords deserve to be hammered.” (But no, you can’t drink while faking.)
If the concept brings to mind a renaissance fair, that’s no accident. Ramsey worked at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire for 17 years, doing everything from art direction to coordinating stunts to playing the king.
Ramsey had an interest in swords and a built-in customer base through his connections, but little blacksmithing experience, he said. Jones, on the other hand, had been a metalworking hobbyist since childhood. They started doing stage fighting workshops, Jones explained, and then focused on selling the machines they had used in the classrooms and making more.
They soon realized that it was difficult to sustain a business simply selling swords and began offering blacksmithing workshops. Participants can pay anywhere from $160 to $950 to forge knives, axes, swords, clubs (from railroad spikes), horseshoe hearts, and the like.
Demand for the classes heated up when they reopened after a COVID-19 shutdown. They began offering more workshops and expanding their staff, which has since grown to more than 20 metalworkers and artisans. Social media and word of mouth have driven business, they said, and their classes draw people from all over Pennsylvania and nearby states. Ramsey estimated that 60% to 70% of participants live an hour or more away.
Workshops allow participants to get up and running [their] legs” in about half an hour, Ramsey said. Drunken Smithy instructors provide general guidance throughout the process: forging, erasing mistakes, and heat treating and tempering projects. A typical knife workshop lasts about three and a half hours, while sword making sessions are scheduled for seven hours.
“We try to make it a whole experience,” Ramsey said. “Come in, make the design for your knife and then learn your safety and what not. And then you get in there and really start doing it. Minimal demo.”
According to Ramsey, forgery is quite intuitive. It’s like shaping Play-Doh or clay, he said — “except it’s 1,800 degrees.”
The pair began looking for a new space after learning their leased location in Palmyra was slated for demolition. Lebanon Valley Mall, it turned out, had the elements they needed to build a forge, like natural gas and extensive electric service.
They weren’t sure it would work. “We really didn’t think they would approve of putting a fake in the center,” Jones said, “but it turns out they did.” It took about a year to properly renovate the initial storefront.
The choice to take on Drunken Smithy as a tenant was a “no-brainer,” center manager Michelle Tuscano told PA Local via email. In today’s retail environment, a small mall filled with traditional stores “is not able to be sustainable,” she wrote. The center became “more open-minded” to less traditional tenants after Lifeway Church, a ten-year-old Christian congregation, began moving in in 2017.
Like other malls in the area and around the country, Lebanon Valley Mall has seen a number of store closings. In addition to Payless and Victoria’s Secret, retailers that have left in recent years include Bath & Body Works, FYE and GameStop. The adjacent 10-screen movie theater closed in early January, and the grocery store next door closed in the fall.
Despite these changes, Tuscano feels “optimistic” about the mall’s future as “more of a community service center and guided experience.”
“We are celebrating 50 years this year and plan to be around for another 50,” Tuscano wrote.
Drunken Smithy takes advantage of the mall’s atmosphere — especially its size — by holding about four mall-wide festivals a year, which they usually co-sponsor with Mancino’s Pizzeria and St. James Players, a community theater group.
The last festival had over 50 vendors, Ramsey said, as well as musicians, actors, a silk aerial artist and a live Dungeons & Dragons game.
“They’re kind of like the Renaissance Faire, but small [and] free to get in,” Jones said of the events, “and indoors, so we can do it in the middle of winter or the heat of summer.”
Beyond fakery and festivals, Jones and Ramsey have more irons in the fire. They recently added a “craft alley” with workstations for copper, leather and other media. And at their newly installed taproom, they plan to serve the honey drink once they get approval from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.
In the future, Jones said, they would like to offer food and feature live music. Ultimately, it’s all about creating a “rich experience,” he said.
“It’s not a place where you come in and it’s like, just big TVs,” Jones said. “I mean, you might as well be at home on your couch…when you come here, it’ll be fun.”
