Casting shed outline

A question we're frequently asked (not as frequently as we're asked "What was this place, anyway?" but still pretty frequently) concerns the place of the blast furnace in the overall scheme of things at Beckley.

After all, there's this magnificent stone column standing there, and somehow it looks more like a work of Neolithic sculpture than an industrial artifact.

One of our most important tasks as Friends of Beckley Furnace is to "interpret" what you see there -- to make it comprehensible.

Toward that end, since the stone column at Beckley Furnace was the furnace itself, and the furnace was only a part of a much larger industrial facility, we've started making it easier to understand that the furnace was actually located in a long-vanished building called the casting shed.

As well as containing the furnace itself, the casting shed also was the place where the molten iron was drawn from the furnace into impressions in a bed of casting sand, making the familiar sow-and-piglet pattern, which gave rise to the term "pig iron".

(click on the image to see it full-sized -- the source of the image is "Scrap Book of North Canaan")

In the lower right corner of the picture, you will see the casting shed, the building with the curved roof. Running horizontally across the middle of the picture is the passageway used to transport the charcoal, iron ore, and limestone from the top of the charging wall (at left) to the top of the furnace.

You'll see that we have outlined the foundation of the casting shed you see in the picture above with limestone. The gap in the outline is where the casting shed door you see in the picture above was located. (Click on any of these pictures to see a larger version).

Outline of the Beckley Furnace casting shed - Western wall

Looking down on the casting shed's western wall. The furnace is off screen to your left. The white limestone shows where the walls of the casting shed once stood.

Looking southwest from a position between the charging wall and the furnace

Looking westward, from the ruins of the boiler house. The furnace appears on your right in the photo, and Blackberry River is off screen to your left

Looking northward, toward the remains of the north wall of the casting house (and where we took the first photo in this row)

We've done a few other minor things to make the site more usable recently. Here are two of them:

1. We had noticed that inside the arches of the furnace it was pretty dark -- hard to see, and really hard to take pictures. Furthermore, the ground was usually muddy. So, we used some of the limestone left over from outlining the casting shed to "floor" the arches. We think it helps; frankly, nobody knows what the floors of the arches were made of when the furnace was in operation, with the exception of the casting arch, where we know that casting sand did that job.

2. We also put up a sturdy vehicle barrier (materials courtesy of the Connecticut DEP) to help protect both the furnace itself and the newly-limed outline of the casting shed. (Click on any of these pictures to see a larger version).

Here's the new vehicle barrier.

Here's a detail from the barrier. Looks pretty solid!

Here's a tuyere arch with the limestone floor in place. Remember, these arches contained pipes through which the hot air was forced into the furnace. The limestone floor definitely improves visibility.

This arch would originally have had "plumbing" in it like the one on the left. However, we now exhibit one of the skips originally used to dump iron ore, limestone, and charcoal into the top of the furnace in this location.

Another 2007 improvement was a new retaining wall to preserve the walkway to the Barnum and Richardson Study Center:

Where was the casting shed?