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Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area

204 Church St, Phoenixville, PA 19460

Phoenix Iron and Steel Co.
The Iron Works - The Early Years
 

In 1790, Benjamin Longstreth established the French Creek Nail Works, which was the first nail factory in the United States.  In 1813, Lewis Wernwag invested in the nail works and renamed it Phoenix Iron Works.  The village soon came to be known as Phoenixville.  Phoenix Iron Works grew from a small nail factory into Phoenix Iron and Steel Company and eventually at its peak employed 2,000 workers.  By 1830, Phoenix Iron Works was one of the largest nail factories in the U. S.  It's maximum production was about three tons of nails per day.  After a fire in 1848, the nail factory was never rebuilt.  It was located where the future Foundry Building was constructed in 1882 by the Phoenix Iron and Steel Company.

In the early 1820s, Phoenix Iron Works needed new capital.  Brothers David and Benjamin Reeves and James and Joseph Whitaker added venture capital.  In 1841, Reeves and Whitaker became the first firm in the area capable of extensive puddling operations after adding six puddling furnaces.   A puddling furnace makes wrought iron or steel from pig iron that is produced in a blast furnace.

In 1842, a survey of the operation concluded that the blast furnace had a capacity for making 1,500 tons of pig iron per year.  The refining furnace had equal capacity and the rolling mill could convert 3,000 tons of pig iron into bars per year. The mill employed 147 workers.

In 1855, the Phoenixville enterprise was reorganized and incorporated as the Phoenix Iron Company with David Reeves, founder, as president and his son Samuel as vice president and treasurer.  The sale of stock provided capital funds.

As demand for steel rails soared in the 1840s, Pennsylvania trackage alone almost quadrupled between 1846 and 1860.  The works at Phoenixville continued to lay the groundwork for a major role in that market. The first steel rails were rolled in November of 1846. The company had three blast furnaces measuring l5' x 59' by mid-decade.  In 1846, the firm changed its name to Reeves, Buck and Company, indicating a fresh source of capital had been obtained from Robert S. Buck of Bridgeton.  Reeves, Buck and Company immediately put the new funds to work erecting a major rail mill.  Other additions in 1846 included a puddling furnace, a reheating mill, blacksmith shops, a foundry, a pattern shop, and a machine shop.  More office and warehouse space was also added.  George Walters, a skilled mechanic who had been with the firm since 1838 and was now chief engineer, was credited with designing and carrying out the expansion.  In the late 1830's, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad came to Phoenixville.  In September of 1837, the 1932 foot long Black Rock Railroad Tunnel was completed although the railroad did not open for business in Phoenixville until January of 1842.  The tunnel was originally 19 feet wide and 17 feet high.  The tunnel was started in December of 1835.

The 1840s represented a decade of triumph and expansion for the Reeves family, with the only major reversal coming on June 25, 1848, when the nail factory burned.  The facility was a total loss and it was never rebuilt.  

The 1850s were also characterized by success, with the Reeves operations stretching from Phoenixville to Safe Harbor in Lancaster County to Bridgeton, NJ to Johnstown, PA.   Reeves, Buck and Company had the most substantial rolling mill in the state, and in certain products such as rails achieved total vertical integration.  They had total control of the production process--from ownership of iron ore and anthracite coal to the production and sale of steel rails.  Furthermore, they turned out more product with less fuel and labor than any of their competitors.

The new direction for Phoenix Iron Co. in the mid 1850's involved an emphasis on the fabrication of structural steel and beams, with nine-inch-deep I-beams being produced at Safe Harbor. By mid-century the expanding Phoenix Iron Works threatened to overwhelm the modest village of Phoenixville, whose population had doubled from 809 in 1840 to l,680 in 1846.  By 1848 the population doubled again to 3,337.   The Reeves could see only one solution to the pressure placed on the existing stock of local housing, and that was to build company housing on land the firm already owned.   At the end of the decade a hundred modest frame structures were erected, portions of which became known as "Puddler's Row" or "Nailer's Row."  Some of these houses have endured and can still be seen tucked away between the north side of Bridge Street and the French Creek.

The creation of company housing at Phoenixville is significant because such accommodations gave the firm greater leverage and thus control over their workers.  This arrangement gathers even more meaning when it is noted that wages paid at Phoenix Iron were consistently low in comparison to other iron works in the region.  Furthermore, management's attitude toward labor was consistently repressive.   In brief, if the Reeves were determined to rule their workers with an iron hand, company housing could serve as a means to that end.

John Griffen, named superintendent at Phoenix in 1856, made significant contributions to the firm.  He had an extensive background that included work at the Norristown Iron Works and at Safe Harbor in Lancaster County, and continued his role as innovator, earning patents for improvements in rolling massive wrought-iron beams that were used in commercial and industrial projects, but his place in history was secured by the invention of the Griffen Gun.  This spirally wrapped wrought-iron gun or cannon had been designed and produced while Griffen was still at Safe Harbor.   The United States Army tested the gun at Fort Monroe in 1856 and 1857 and were pleased with what they learned, for exploding cannon shells were at that time still a problem for the Army and Navy, and would continue to be so for several more years.   The net result was orders for about 1,400 guns that were produced by Phoenix Iron between 1861 and 1865, with some good publicity  for Griffen and the Phoenix Iron Co.

The Civil War years brought contracts for the highly successful Griffen Gun, yet the success of the gun probably does not compare with the firm's greater claim to historical significance: the invention, fabrication, sale, and utilization of the famous Phoenix Steel Column.  It was invented by Samuel Reeves in 1862. The Phoenix Steel Column is hollow and circular and made up of four, six, or eight wrought-iron segments that are flanged and riveted together.  A drawing of them is on the left.  Reeves had created a device that would greatly facilitate the construction of tall buildings by eliminating the need for brutally heavy and thick load-bearing walls.  The Phoenix Steel Column also had structural applications in bridges, viaducts, and elevated lines.  Architect Alan Burham argued that its real advantage over the cast-iron column was that wrought iron could be riveted--a feature that became important in the 1880s when designs for taller and taller buildings on narrow urban lots had to address windbracing.  Connections between riveted steel columns and beams were sufficiently rigid that windbracing became a relatively simple task.

The Foundry Building before its recent restoration.

Phoenix Steel Columns were used in the Second Avenue Elevated Line and the New York Metropolitan Elevated extension from 83rd Street to 159th Street.  They were used in an engineering wonder known as the Kinzua Viaduct to transport trains over the Kinzua Valley in Pennsylvania.  They played a vital role in noteworthy buildings in New York City, including the R. G. Dun Building, the World Building, and the Commercial Cable Building.  Phoenix Steel Columns were used generally in bridge work, for compression chords in trusses and for structural demands involving both compression and bending.  They were used for shoring up sections of mines.   Phoenix Steel Columns displayed an extraordinary ability to withstand heavy loads.  Phoenix steel Columns would have been used to build the never-financed or built 1,000-foot high observation tower that David Reeves envisioned for the Centennial Exposition, described in Scientific American, January 24, 1874.

   Phoenix Iron Works

The The Foundry Building as it looks in 2010 after its recent restoration. The Gay Street Bridge is seen in the background. The Foundry Building was constructed in 1882 at the Phoenix Iron and Steel Company plant that covered over 130 acres. The Foundry Building is now the home of the Schuylkill River Heritage Center. Click for their web site, www.phoenixvillefoundry.org.

Phoenix Iron & Steel Documents:   The Society has close ties with the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester and The Hagley Library in Greenville, Delaware, which houses papers of the Phoenix Iron & Steel Company and the Phoenix Bridge Company.

The source for much of this article is from Without Fitting, Filing, or Chipping, by Thomas R. Winpenny,  Canal History and Technology Press, 1996.  Another source is the Annals of Phoenixville And Its Vicinity by Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, reprinted in 1976 from the original edition that was published by Bavis & Pennypacker in Philadelphia in 1872.

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