Nineteenth Century Iron Stove Trade in the United St...

Although the manufacturing of iron stoves began to flourish in the United States in the 1820s, it was not so common in the early nineteenth century. Furnaces that used high temperatures to extract iron from iron ore (rocks) were located in the mountains of the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. These furnaces had easy access to abundant supplies of ore and to the wood used for heating the iron. Facilities known as foundries that made cast-iron goods by heating and shaping pig iron—a high-carbon form of iron already extracted from ore and cooled in a mold called a pig—were less limited by location. Urban foundries became important producers of finished cast-iron consumer products after the War of 1812, but they still needed to secure pig iron from furnaces located in remote areas, and it was cheaper to make stove plates directly at the furnace. The average furnace at the time used the equivalent of 150 to 500 acres of wood a year for charcoal, depending upon efficiency. Large operations like Pennsylvania's Hopewell Furnace needed five or six thousand cords of wood (one cord is about 39 cubic meters) each year to create about one thousand tons of pig iron.Their voracious appetite for charcoal and ore meant that furnaces needed to be close to those resources, but that meant they were far from the population centers where stoves were most needed. The best way to ship heavy goods like stove plates was via waterways, but the distant location of many iron-making facilities ruled out that mode of transportation.

Most stoves traveled to local markets by some combination of horse-drawn wagon and water transport. Martha Furnace, an operation in southern New Jersey, manufactured pig iron and stove plates for customers in the immediate area, including the city of Philadelphia. Stoves were a regular part of Martha Furnace's business, showing up in entries in the clerk's diary in the summer of 1810. Martha Furnace demonstrated the typical characteristics of the early stove trade: it serviced and relied upon local markets for the most part, offered few changes in design from year to year, and did not attempt to specialize in stove manufacture.

Broader changes in the United States economy after the War of 1812, most notably the improvement of roads and canals and the advent of railroads, transformed the nation's iron trade. The drive to cut costs and increase the speed of transportation through the construction of land and water routes between cities involved massive amounts of capital and construction on an unprecedented scale. The most famous of these projects was the Erie Canal, an ambitious system that used dams, locks used to raise and lower boats, and other cutting-edge transportation technology to create a 563-kilometer water link between Albany and Buffalo in the state of New York. The Erie Canal came with an astonishing $7 million price tag—a figure that in today's dollars would be measured in billions—and was financed, constructed, and operated by the state of New York. After its completion in 1825, the cost of shipping goods from Buffalo to New York City fell by roughly 90 percent. New York's success story inspired other states to build canals; Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan all devised expensive and publicly funded canal systems during the "canal boom" of the 1820s and 1830s. Many of these projects failed to earn a profit, and by the 1840s and 1850s the peak of state-funded internal improvements had passed.

The subsequent development of the nation's rail network came mostly through private investment; but these overland routes blended with the waterways constructed with public funds to create a dense network of new transportation options for iron manufacturers. When the cost of transport dropped, so did prices. By 1860, the cost of land transport of heavy items like iron had been reduced by 95 percent from that of the 1810s. Although much of this came as the result of private initiative, it is important to remember the role that state authorities played in starting this revolution in transportation. As public and private projects raced to connect markets, the cumulative impact on United States manufacturing was profound. For the iron trade, it meant that bulky commodities like stove plates could be shipped across greater distances and at less cost than ever before.