Pennsylvania iron.(Design notes)

Pennsylvania has been a center for the iron industry since the early eighteenth century, and some of the most beautiful American ironwork was, and still is, produced there. In the early days the region was rich in the materials needed to make iron: timber, limestone, and iron ore. In Jeannette Lasansky's seminal study To Draw, Upset, and Weld: The Work of the Pennsylvania Rural Blacksmith, 1742-1935 (1980), she writes that in Philadelphia alone in 1788 there were 214 blacksmiths, and nearly 800 blacksmiths are recorded as working in Union County between 1780 and 1890. She relates that farm owners frequently had a blacksmith's shop on their land to make repairs and create nails, tools, and the all-important shoes for oxen, mules, and horses. Indeed, making shoes required blacksmiths to learn the anatomy, behavior, and diseases peculiar to these animals. These versatile rural blacksmiths were called on to fashion or repair edge tools, augers, scythes, plows, shovels, railings, pots, pans, cutlery, kitchen utensils, and building and furniture hardware. In cities, foundries and forges were large commercial affairs often employing up to forty or fifty men. Iron-workers in both urban and rural settings made all kinds of lighting devices, from the simplest betty and kettle lamps to more complicated, multitiered chandeliers.

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The great early collector Henry Francis du Pont was drawn to American cast and wrought iron from the beginning. Understanding that iron products--architectural hardware, fireplace tools and utensils, and lighting devices--were an integral part of early American households, he purchased his first pieces of antique iron, what he called floor lights, at an auction in Connecticut in 1924. He was attracted to all forms of early metalwork, and in 1945 he even purchased about 150 handwrought nails from Charles F. Montgomery, ...