Austin Seward was a blacksmith, a gunsmith, a tool maker and the founder of Seward and Company in 1821. He built a log shop at the corner of 7th and Walnut Streets and started a blacksmith business, providing essentials to the local community. The Seward Foundry created everything a rural Indiana town needed including; augers, braces, bits, bells, scythes, files, guns, knives, axes, sickles, sheep shears, plows, horseshoes, stoves, skillets, and pots and pans. When the Civil War split the country in 1861 the foundry produced solid shot and bombshells for the Union Army. Seward and Company famously cast a bronze cannon made with copper donated by the community and used in a conflict in Henderson, Kentucky. He was the Director of the first Bloomington town band and a founding member of the First Presbyterian Church.