Pictured, Felicia Doughty Kingsbury, photography contributed by Tyler Resch
"Furnace Foundations: A perceptive exploration of early blast furnaces in the Salisbury Ore District where Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York converge, conducted in the summer of 1951 by Felicia Doughty Kingsbury, when working as curator of properties for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in Boston."
Foreword by Tyler Resch (excerpt):
Felicia
Doughty Kingsbury was my mother-in-law, whom I knew well in her later years,
long after her professional involvement with architecture, or archaeology, or
her work with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now
known as Historic New England). She was an authority on old houses, was curator
of SPNEA properties, and she edited its quarterly journal, Old-Time New
England. Among the tools of her trade was an ice pick she carried to test the
integrity of ancient beams. I wish that I had known her in her prime, when she
was a strong and self-sufficient independent woman. It was at the bottom of a box of her
long-neglected papers and family photographs that I happened recently upon this
manuscript that describes her studious tour of the blast furnaces of the
Salisbury Ore District in the summer of 1951.
[Kingsbury's study of Copake begins here:]
It was impossible to thank “our local historian” adequately
for so much generosity of time and information, and I felt very solitary again
and without guidance, as I turned north to find the furnace of the Copake Iron
Co., now within Taconic State Park.
Another
glance at a road map will show that the park covers a large area and is not
marked clearly to show access or entrance. I had long heard it said that it is
one of our most beautiful and best maintained state parks: a mountainous
wilderness made into a playground. In such a place a blast furnace would be as
a needle in a haystack, but Copake Falls is shown on the map, and this had been
named as the general location of the furnace. I found it also to hold the main
entrance to the park, and without difficulty reached the house of the park
superintendent near at hand. He was a busy man, for several cars were already
parked there arranging for camping privileges.
Park activities were much in evidence, for across the road a grove
sheltered a small village of cabins and recreational buildings from which
issued the clatter of dishes and the strains of community song. Just to the
left, a gravel road crossed the main one and was lined with prim little white
clapboarded Victorian houses. These apparently were occupied by park rangers
and help. At the junction of the two roads the main road was closed off by
stone posts with a chain across and a sign saying “Positively No Admittance.”
Beyond the gateposts the road narrowed but led as straight as could the shortest
distance between two points, to Copake Furnace itself.
The
superintendent was a shrewd, firm man, hard-pressed with the responsibility of
keeping the forest and the tenderfeet from doing each other any harm.
Conditioned by summer campers who habitually think themselves the one exception
to every rule, it was generous of him to take down the no-admittance sign, to
trust me to park by the no=parking sign, and to leave me alone with his
precious park tools and machinery, to study the furnace at will.
The
furnace of the Copake Iron Company shows the most modern equipment of any in
the Salisbury Ore District, partly because its operation did not cease until
1902, and party, it is said, because the company was exceptionally progressive
in an industry noted for conservatism, and was always ready to adopt a new
method. A modern flight of steps led to the top of the loading platform behind
the furnace, and from there it was possible to survey the general plan of the
works.
A
narrow valley hardly more than a pocket is enclosed by steep and heavily wooded
slopes. At each end of the furnace area and perhaps a mile apart, ravines block
the level stretch of valley floor. Furnace activities occupied the entire
stretch of miniature intervale and had been laid out in the orderly pattern of
functionalism. The stream appeared at the upper ravine where an earth dam had a
small gatehouse enclosed in walls of fine ashlar. It then skirted the base of
the opposite slope and disappeared behind the barns and outbuildings of the
superintendent’s house. Directly before me on the streambank a long brick
building had probably contained company offices and possibly an engine house.
Park officials were using it for much the same purpose now, though tractors and
trucks parked near translated it to this century. A small brick building close
to the road had the familiar scales outside, such as coal wagons use, and had
been the weigher’s office. Looking back through the gate it was obvious from
its size and location that the present superintendent’s house had always served
such a use, and that the smaller house on the side road had been built for the
furnace workers, probably foremen. The loading platform, on which I was
standing, was approached from the woods by a worn old cart track, the ore road,
which followed along its top to descend to the lower ground beyond the furnace
toward the gate. Immediately behind the furnace, on the platform, an additional
foundation a few feet higher but flush with the road had been the abutment for
the loading bridge to the furnace top, and just equaled it in height.
Only
a few feet away, the furnace itself looked ragged and infirm. The four brick
gothic arches rest upon foundations of masonry, the three heavy courses rising
about four feet above grade vertically before the spring of the two-centered
arch begins. The arches are very deep – eight to ten feet – and in good
condition. In fact, the arches are the only part of the furnace visible from
outside, which give an indication of its original structural character. The
ashlar bases are all that is left, of the fine masonry that covered the
exterior prior to its recent removal by the park authorities. The pile of
rubble that the furnace now exposes was originally only the fill between inner
lining and outer casing, and its roughness gives a false impression of a
furnace belonging to an earlier period.
The
furnace interior, however, is striking in its contrast to early ones, and
presented several features that I had not heretofor encountered. Most conspicuous
of these differences is the greatly increased amount of iron visible within the
arches. The crucible is entirely or iron, made of curved plates bolted together
to form a short cylinder about three feet high. Inside the crucible a lining of
a single thickness of firebrick extends from floor upwards through the shaft.
Above the crucible an air space about a foot deep surrounds the brick lining
and is enclosed by another layer of brick, this one supported at the boshes, or
about five feet six inches above grade, by a system of three iron beams which,
in cross section, would look like I-beams. These like the iron crucible held
channels that permitted them to be cooled by circulating water. Gauges by which
to judge the water level were provided by the short vertical pipes terminated
at the top by cups standing at each side of the inner arch. It is probable that
many of the furnaces that operated in the latter part of the nineteenth century
or later were at one time provided with iron crucibles and water cooling-down
devices. The last two wars, however, have stimulated scavenging to such an
extent that all blast furnaces in the area are said to have been combed for
scrap. This would account for the emptiness of many furnaces visited, and makes
Copake unique in still possessing equipment that illustrates the most modern
development of the blast furnace achieved in the Salisbury Ore District.
