Making Iron on the Bald Eagle: Roland Curtin’s Ironworks and Workers’ Community (Keystone Books)

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Description

In 1810, Irish immigrant Roland Curtin launched a charcoal ironmaking operation in central Pennsylvania that continued for 110 years. Through this engaging account of Curtin and his iron plantation, Gerald Eggert provides crucial chapter in the history of the iron industry in The us. Eggert’s story begins with Curtin’s arrival in the Bald Eagle Valley in 1797. From the time he constructed his first forge on the south bank of Bald Eagle Creek until the final closing of the Eagle Ironworks in 1922, Roland and his sons, then his grandsons, and still later a great-grandson operated what had grow to be one of Centre County’s major enterprises. All over much of its history, the Eagle Works employed between 100 and 200 full- and part-time workmen.

Eggert analyzes the workforce and describes life in the workers’ village. The relationships, lifestyles, and housing of the Curtins, in contrast to those of their employees, offer insights into the social history of the period. Eggert also provides an excellent summary of the ironmaking process—from the cutting of wood and making of charcoal to the mining of ore and smelting of the iron—and the challenges of transporting iron products out of the frontier to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The long history of the Curtin circle of relatives’s Eagle Ironworks mirrors both the upward push and the long decline of American charcoal-iron production. Typical of the small, circle of relatives-owned enterprises that bridged the gap between preindustrial and modern industrial production, the history of the Eagle Ironworks illustrates both the industrializing and, later, the deindustrializing processes and the have an effect on these had on all who were involved. When the Eagle Ironworks closed in 1922, it was once the last charcoal-iron establishment in Pennsylvania and probably the most two or three last such works in america.

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