Story of Old Iron Works

I notice that different parties have been writing about the charcoal furnaces built in Lawrence, Scioto, and Jackson counties, and I will give you my recollections of their building.

In 1826 Massie sold out to the other stockholders and went to Missouri.  My father, a clerk with the company, went with Steece and built Merimee Iron Works.  They also built a grist mill operated by water power from a spring from which a stream came out of the ground about the barrel’s diameter.  The water was clear as crystal, and there was many fish in the spring.

They would come up to the surface and attempt to return, but the water came up with such power that they could return with difficulty.  The milldam was about 200 yards below the spring, and it was the general belief that the spring came from an underground lake.  Father lived there for years, and three of his children were born there.  It was a wild country inhabited by man Indians, who would frequently visit us, and we, the children, were taken up into their arms and carried off some distance to see what mother would do.

Father was in poor health, so we returned to Marble Furnace, Steece sold out and returned to Lawrence county, and Steece, Ellison & Co. built Mt. Vernon furnace.  George Theyes and his father were the first blacksmiths of the furnace.  Father became one of the engineers.  They had four boilers fired by stone coal.  In the spring of 1845, they put the boilers on the top of the stack, making two out of the four.

It was the first furnace in southern Ohio to put the boilers on top of the stack.  At this time, John Campbell became a stockholder and manager of the furnace.  He married an Ellison.

I heard Ellison tell my father that the first hundred dollars he ever earned were chopping cordwood at Lawrence furnace.  In 1856, Mr. Steece and his eldest son, James, went to Missouri to select a furnace site.  While there, he took the choler and died, leaving four sons and three daughters.  Mr.  Beard, a clerk at Olive Furnace, married one of the daughters, and he and James Steece built the Iron Valley furnace. They sold out in 1854, and Beard then built what was called the Beard Furnace in the valley near the Gore furnace. He died there.

Mr. Willard married his youngest daughter and Doc Cotton, the oldest.  We were schoolmates together at Mt. Vernon.  Some writers claim they had foundries at these charcoal furnaces.  I was familiar with all the charcoal furnaces in those counties but never saw a foundry in connection with them.  I wish those writers would inform me where they were found at.

They did make castings at these furnaces.  It was done this way – when the moulders, ten to twenty in number, were ready for the casing, the keepers would use a hoe made for moulding or making pig iron.  The cinders were always pulled out first with a ladle, holding over a peck each, with handles four or five feet in length.  They dipped the ladles in mortar holes to get a good coating on them and placed them in a hot cinder to dry well.

A loose sleeve made of a coffee sack was used on the right arm, and a wet apron of the same material was worn on the other side next to the iron.  The engines were stopped until the casting was done.  In making large vessels requiring more than one ladle, the moulders would join together, for it had been put in the flask simultaneously—the men moulded by the piece.  It was cast aside if any holes were found in the molded piece.  Every molder had a boy to hold the dross back while pouring the iron in.

Father’s family was the second to move to the furnace.  He lived in a little old log house about 15×18 on the ground purchased by the furnace site.  It took about twenty teams of cattle and horses to haul the iron to Hanging Rock, a distance of 15 miles, requiring two days for the trip.  Mt. Vernon, Lawrence, Center, Etna, Pine Grove, Vesuvius, and LaGrange furnaces hauled iron to Hanging Rock going in on the same road from a point some four miles this side of Hanging Rock.  It was one continuous mud hole in wintertime from the furnace to the river.

Buckhorn was built by Samuel Finley (of Chillicothe), a stockholder in Marble Furnace, with Steece and sold out his interests at the same time Steece did.  Buckhorn went into blast about the same time as Mt. Vernon. Sam Bratton was a member of the company owing Buckhorn.