Appalachian Blacksmiths Association

Antebellum Iron Works in Western Virginia; 
Part I, an introduction

By Dave Allen, Editor  
Note: West Virginia was not formed from Virginia until 1863.

This introduction provides an overview of the iron industry prior to the Civil War. As Philippi, VA (now WV) was the site of the first land battle of the war, I thought that we might begin by taking a look at the iron works at Valley Furnace, near there. The ruins of the blast furnace still stand along WV-38 between Nestorville and the Barbour/Tucker County line.

Located along WV 38 in eastern Barbour County, the present-day ruins of the 1850’s iron furnace give no hint of iron smelting. The furnace produced over four tons per day during its six-year life.

The “WV Geological Survey for Barbour County, 1918” provides much of what has been written about the operation. Included in that survey is a paragraph from “History of Barbour County”, by Hu Maxwell (1899), which is given as: 
“The furnace on Brushy Fork was built in 1848 and was used six years. The blast was operated first by water-power and afterwards by an [steam] engine (believed to have been the first in Barbour County, about 1850.) It was thirty-nine feet high when built, but is little more than half of that now, much of the stone of which it was built having been removed for various purposes. The fuel was charcoal, and about 9,000 pounds of iron were produced a day. This was hauled by mule teams to Fairmont, where it was loaded on steamers. The furnace stands on a seam of coal which was not used for fuel.”

The iron ore smelted in the furnace came from iron carbonate nodules found in the Bolivar Fire Clay deposit which is about 25’ thick. Thus, many laborers had to dig through the clay seam with picks and shovels to gather the small lumps of iron. 

The Valley Furnace area also has shale deposits with an iron content of 10%. But 1850’s mining technology didn’t lend itself to handling 45 tons per day of shale ore to produce the same tonnage that nodules yielded. Limestone, which is used as flux in the smelt, is plentiful in the area.

An interesting note is that the furnace is actually built on a coal seam. Yet, charcoal was the preferred fuel to fire the furnace. (See “charcoal iron”, part 6 of this series.) 

After six years of production, the iron nodules were probably getting scarce. According to “WV Geological Survey”, the iron nodules were found only in the local vicinity of the furnace and are not found throughout the clay stratum elsewhere in the county.

Where did the iron go when it reached Fairmont? Well, we don’t actually know that. But a good guess would be that it traveled down the Monongahela River to Pittsburgh and then on the Ohio River to Wheeling. Evidence exists that the Wheeling mills purchased iron from northwestern Virginia furnaces.  In the antebellum days of iron manufacture, operations like Valley Furnace were commonplace. Blast furnaces were located where timber and iron were plentiful. Transporting fuel, limestone, and iron ore to a large, regional blast furnace was not feasible until the railroad lines were more developed. For example, the first Wheeling-area blast furnace wasn’t built until 1859.

Valley Furnace produced pig iron. Molten iron was poured into ditches which had the shapes of a sow with her suckling piglets; hence, the name. The iron in the pigs contained as much as 5% carbon as well as other impurities (phosphorous, silica, etc.) and had to be refined further.

To refine pig iron, it was puddled, a process invented by Henry Cort in England about 1785. The iron pigs were melted in a reverberatory furnace heated by indirect coal fire. A “puddler” stirred the hot metal with a rabble, a long hooked rod.  (Some writers refer to the puddler as a "rabbler" because he used a rabble.)

The puddler controlled the furnace temperature and air draft to first burn off phosphorous, and then silica and carbon. He constantly had to stir with his rabble.

As the impurities burned off, the iron clumped together in pasty balls. The puddler raked the pasty iron balls together to make one large lump weighing up to 300 lbs. 

The puddler declared that the iron had “come to nature” when the iron was decarburized. A crane with tongs then lifted the lump of iron out of the furnace.

Puddlers had a strenuous job and worked very close to the high heat. But theirs was a job of skill as well as of strength and stamina. 

According to “Transnational West Virginia; Wheeling Iron and the Welsh,” nearly all puddlers were Welsh immigrants. It seems that no other particular group of men could master the job. In that era, many puddlers died by age 50 because of the demands of their job. Why, then, did these Welshmen take this grueling job? 

Pride was one reason. James J. Davis, a Welsh-born puddler who served as US Secretary of Labor from 1921-1930, wrote in his autobiography (The Iron Puddler) of his love for the job that not only demanded great physical strength but the “mental knowledge” to know when the iron was ready. As puddlers were quite skilled, they were very well-paid.

The large ball of puddled iron was first “shingled” by a powered forge hammer called a “helve”.  The helve pressed and shaped the iron and also forced out slag inclusions. The shingles were then rolled to the desired thickness in a rolling mill with grooved rollers. Henry Cort also invented the rolling process.

Wheeling’s first rolling mill, the Missouri Iron Works, was built by Peter Schoenberger in 1832-34. The mill specialized in cut nail manufacture but never had over 14 nail machines. Schoenberger’s plant was also called the “Top Mill” as it was located at the north, or ’top’ end of Wheeling.

Over the next two decades, six more rolling mills were built and half of them made nails exclusively. Buildings were then being “balloon framed” with dimension lumber and the demand for nails was steadily increasing.  Wheeling’s LaBelle plant, which still operates today, was built in 1852 by Bailey, Woodward & Co. With 25 nail machines, the plant produced about 200 kegs of nails per day at startup. Just as Detroit became known as Motor City, Wheeling became “Nail City.”

This was the nature of iron production before the Civil War. Iron was transported from a far-flung assortment of blast furnaces to the finishing mills. The wagon trip from Valley Furnace to Fairmont took three or more days. The downriver trip by steamer depended more on river conditions than the speed of the craft.

As we have seen, there was little mechanization until the iron reached the rolling mill. Each step of the iron making process was heavily dependent on manual labor. The founder (blast furnace operator) and the puddler had to be highly-skilled men or the whole system failed. There was little scientific knowledge of metallurgy.

The Bessemer process was patented in 1855, the same year that the Soo Canal joined Lake Huron with Lake Superior. The canal route led to the rich Michigan and Minnesota iron ores. The railroads were expanding and the Civil War (1861) created a great demand for armaments and munitions.

All of these events came together almost overnight and changed iron making in America from a skilled craft into a sophisticated, mass-production industry.

Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank Dr. Peter King of Stourbridge and Chris Topp & Co., Ltd., North Yorkshire, England for their contribution of technical information for this article.

Additional sources: 

• American Iron, 1607-1900, Robert B. Gordon. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

• WV Geological Survey for Barbour and Upshur Counties, 1918

• Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change 1840-1940. "Wheeling Iron and the Welsh", by Anne Kelly Knowles.  Edited by Kenneth Fones-Wolf and Ron Lewis.  West Virginia University Press, 2002. 
  
  
  This article originally appeared in the March 2004 ABA Newsletter

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