Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site

Iron fuels American Revolutionaries

In a climate of disintegrating relations between England and its American colonies, Mark Bird, already an important figure in the booming colonial iron industry, built Hopewell Furnace in eastern Pennsylvania in 1771. When open conflict erupted in 1775, England’s ministers regretted not having been more successful in their efforts to rein in the American ironmasters. They knew the iron industry was now going to be turned against the mother country. Ever since colonists had carried blast furnace technology to America in the mid-17th century, England had been worried by the rapid expansion of the industry and the increasing skill with which American ironmasters turned out cast and wrought iron products. Crown officials wanted to limit them to producing raw pig iron (rough cast bars), which would be shipped to England and processed into profitable goods – which could then be sold back to America. But the colonies weren't about to give up such a lucrative enterprise. When Parliament prohibited the building of more ironworks, American revolutionaries defied the law. They both cast iron and refined it into wrought iron, from which they made a broad range of competitive products. By the time of the Revolution, American furnaces, forges, and mills were turning out a seventh of the world’s iron goods.

Furnace in the Schuylkill Valley, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s combination of abundant raw materials, water power, and religious tolerance drew enterprising ironmasters from other colonies and from Europe. By the time Mark Bird built his furnace in the Schuylkill Valley, Pennsylvania was on its way to becoming the most important iron-producing colony. Bird immediately began casting stove plates despite the British ban, and when the war began he was a steady supplier of cannon and shot to the Continental Army and Navy. As the war drew to an end, however, Bird’s troubles began to mount: He had difficulty collecting debts from the young nation, and he suffered reverses in the general depression that followed independence. A flood in 1786 severely damaged the operations. These setbacks eventually ruined Bird, and in 1788 he was forced to auction off "Hopewell Plantation" at a sheriff’s sale. Bird fled his remaining creditors, moving to North Carolina.

Beating swords into stove plates, new owners converted to peacetime production, but the operation remained unprofitable. The partnership of Daniel Buckley and his brothers-in-law Mathew and Thomas Brooke bought the furnace in 1800 and invested in major repairs. But natural disasters, a national recession, and litigation closed the furnace in 1808. When it was fired again eight years later, Hopewell benefited from protective tariffs, a rapidly improving transportation system, and large numbers of immigrants looking for work. These national developments and the Hopewell owners’ decision to concentrate on castings, especially stove plates, provided the foundation for success. But it was the imaginative leadership of a partner’s son, Clement Brooke, that brought the operation to the peak of its prosperity. Brook was resident manager of the furnace from 1816 to 1831, when he inherited a share and became ironmaster. He presided over Hopewell during its best years, when the furnace supplied a wide variety of iron products to cities along the east coast.

Hopewell in the Panic of 1837

The Panic of 1837, which occurred at the zenith of Hopewell’s fortunes, undermined the community’s prosperity. The markets for castings shrank, and Brooke was forced in 1844 to abandon production of the popular Hopewell stove. Although the demand for pig iron, especially during the Civil War, gave the furnace a temporary reprieve, it never again achieved the success of the 1830s. Hopewell’s decline was hastened by the coming of America’s mature industrial age. Iron making was being transformed from the old rural charcoal-fired and water-powered furnaces to urban concentrations of steam-powered, hot-blast coke and anthracite furnaces. Complexes in Pittsburgh and Birmingham were fed by train loads of ore and coal from huge western deposits. New processes of integrated iron and Bessemer steel production further rendered the old ways obsolete.

After Brooke retired in 1848, Hopewell’s owners found it increasingly difficult to complete. They made efforts to keep up, building an anthracite hot-blast furnace and installing a backup steam engine for the blast machinery. The new furnace was a failure, and in any case their efforts only delayed the inevitable. Iron plantations like Hopewell, overtaken by the shift from the age of iron and water power to the age of steel and steam, were unable to follow the industry into the 20^th century. In the summer of 1883, Hopewell Furnace made its final blast.

In America’s industrial infancy, tall stone structures venting smoke and flames were a familiar part of the rural landscape. These charcoal-fueled iron furnaces produced the versatile metal crucial to the nation’s growth. For over a century, Hopewell was one of hundreds of "iron plantations" built around this technology. Here generations of ironmasters, craftsmen, and workers produced iron goods during war and peace – ranging from cannon and shot to the well-known Hopewell stove and domestic items such as pots and sash weights. Shared social and family bonds in an atmosphere of reasonable cooperation made these plantations stable and productive communities, the base on which America’s iron and steel industry was founded.

Both rural Pennsylvania community and "iron plantation," Hopewell turned out products for a growing nation.