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.
On the Fourth of July, 1840, while towns up and down the Lehigh Valley lit fireworks for the nation’s birthday, a furnace twelve miles from Easton made history of its own: the first successful cast of American anthracite iron. Easton did not light that furnace. But without Easton, the fire might never have caught.
This is the story of Easton’s anthracite iron network — the furnaces, canals, and hard-won experiments that turned a stubborn, hard-to-burn coal into the fuel of an industrial revolution, and turned Easton into an essential link in the chain that made it possible.
Anthracite had been mined in the Lehigh Valley for decades, but ironmasters distrusted it. Its dense, nearly smokeless burn made it hard to ignite and even harder to sustain inside a traditional charcoal furnace. The real breakthrough was not the coal at all — it was new furnace technology. Heated air, pumped directly into the furnace and known as hot-blast, finally made anthracite practical.
In 1837, Welsh ironmaster David Thomas achieved successful anthracite smelting in Wales using this method. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, leaders of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, heard of his success and recruited him across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania. Thomas arrived in 1839 and directed construction of the Lehigh Crane Iron Works at Catasauqua, roughly twelve miles upriver from Easton. Its first furnace went into blast on July 3, 1840. The first successful cast followed the next day — the moment now regarded as the commercial birth of the American anthracite iron industry.
Easton earned its place in this story through geography and grit, not through that first cast. The Lehigh Navigation carried coal downriver into town, where it connected with the Delaware and Morris canals, opening routes toward Philadelphia and New York while iron ore moved in the opposite direction from New Jersey. Easton and the surrounding Lehigh Valley functioned as one integrated industrial corridor.
South Easton became its own proving ground. Around 1839, Barnet, Swift and Company built a charcoal-fired blast furnace there, powered by canal water; the site was later rebuilt to run on anthracite.
James Van Buren attempted a separate experimental anthracite furnace in the same district, but after prolonged effort, it failed outright. A few miles south, at Glendon, the technology finally took hold for good. William Firmstone had scouted the Lehigh Valley as a site for anthracite ironmaking, and Charles Jackson Jr. backed the venture that followed. Construction began in 1842, and the first Glendon furnace was blown in during 1844, becoming one of the region’s major anthracite iron works.
Anthracite could support far larger iron production than charcoal ever could, since charcoal supply was tied to shrinking forests and anthracite was tied to a mine that would not run out for generations.
Once furnaces no longer needed to sit beside a woodlot, they could sit beside a canal instead — and Easton was built on canals. The furnaces that failed and the furnaces that succeeded depended on the same transportation corridor: coal moving downriver, ore and finished iron moving out.
Railroads would later expand that same network and eventually overtake the canals as the region’s dominant freight technology. Easton was not the birthplace of anthracite iron. It was the network that let the idea travel, spread, and multiply across the valley.
That network still shapes Easton’s map today. The Lehigh River corridor, the streets of South Easton, and the site of the Glendon furnaces all preserve the memory of a decade when a stubborn coal, a Welsh ironmaster’s method, and a web of canals rewired how — and where — America made iron.
Visit the Lehigh River waterfront in Easton, Pennsylvania to learn about the old canal towpaths to the industrial ruins still standing along the river.
Information for this episode was provided by the Library of Congress Historic American Engineering Record on the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Lehigh University’s Beyond Steel project, the Lehigh Valley History account of the Borough of South Bethlehem, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, the City of Easton’s history of the canal years, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company records.
