Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
In the spring of 1844, a furnace roared to life on the banks of the Lehigh Canal south of Easton, and a new kind of iron age began. The fuel was anthracite coal — hard, hot-burning, and abundant in the Pennsylvania hills to the north. The man who lit it was William Firmstone, an English ironmaster who had spent nearly a decade learning the American iron trade before landing on this particular stretch of canal. What he built in Easton would become, for a time, one of the most productive iron operations in the state.
Today, that site is a hiking trail in Hugh Moore Park. The story of Glendon starts with a Boston financier named Charles Jackson Jr. In 1842, Jackson was looking for a place to build an anthracite-fueled iron furnace — a technology so new that only one such furnace existed in the entire United States. He turned to Firmstone, who was then working in Pottsville, and asked him to scout the Lehigh Valley. Firmstone traveled to Catasauqua, visited the Crane Iron Works, and came away convinced. By September 1842, a site along the Lehigh Navigation canal had been selected.
The location was deliberate. The canal gave the iron works two things it could not operate without: water to power the blowing engines that forced air into the furnace, and a transportation corridor to move raw materials in and the finished iron out. Anthracite arrived from the coalfields to the north. Iron ore came from local deposits. And, later, from mines the company purchased in Hibernia, New Jersey. Once smelted into pig iron and cooled, the product traveled by canal boat north to New York, then by schooner to rolling mills in Boston.
Firmstone had learned the iron trade from his uncles, who operated hot-blast furnaces at the Lay Works near Dudley in the English Midlands. He arrived in the United States in 1835 and spent years introducing the hot-blast method at furnaces in Ohio and Pennsylvania before Charles Jackson found him. When the first furnace at Glendon was blown in on March 15, 1844, it was only the second anthracite iron furnace in the country.
The works expanded quickly. A second furnace was added in 1846, and a third in 1850. At peak production in the early 1870s, when all furnaces ran simultaneously, Glendon
produced more than 58,000 tons of pig iron in a single year. Around the furnaces, a company town took shape and at its height, Glendon employed around 250 men.
William Firmstone managed the works from their founding through much of the company’s productive life. In 1881, his son Frank Firmstone rebuilt and modernized the second and third furnaces, raising them to 80 feet. The entire operation was modernized again between 1887 and 1889. None of it was enough.
By the 1880s, new steel-making methods began to undercut traditional furnace iron. In 1894, the company declared operations unprofitable and shut the furnaces for good. The Glendon Iron Company was dissolved in 1896. Within a few years, the machinery had been dismantled and the brick stacks pulled down for scrap.
What the Glendon Iron Works represents is the opening chapter of an industrial transformation. When Firmstone lit that first furnace in 1844, anthracite iron was an experiment. Within a decade, it had become the standard. Glendon was among the handful of early operations that proved the technology worked — and that the Lehigh Valley, with its canal system and nearby coal, was exactly the right place to do it.
Hikers on the trail through Hugh Moore Park today pass over stone foundations and slag piles — the last physical evidence of the Glendon Iron Works. A historical marker erected by the City of Easton marks the site and names Firmstone and Jackson. Hugh Moore Park is located along the Lehigh Canal in Easton, Pennsylvania. For more information, visit hughmooreparkeaston.org or the Canal Museum at Delaware and Lehigh.
Information for this episode was provided by the City of Easton’s Glendon Iron Works historical marker, the Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org), the Wikipedia article on the Glendon Iron Company, Lehigh Valley History (lehighvalleyhistory.com), and the Lawrence County Ohio furnace history archive.
