Furnace Foundations, by Felicia Doughty Kingsbury (1951)

 Editor's Note:  Our good friend and History Advisory Board member Victor Rolando recently forwarded to our attention, a fascinating article written in 1951 by Felicia Doughty Kingsbury, who, that year, undertook a scholarly tour of the "Salisbury Iron District."  In 2011, historian Tyler Resch, uncovered Kingsbury's manuscript of that tour which included a spine tingling assessment of the Copake Iron Works.  We excerpt here the section on Copake Falls.  The entire article is available by clicking here.

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.