Long Pond Ironworks
Posted by: 
briansnat
N 41° 08.733 W 074° 18.683
18T E 557786 N 4555143
The Long Pond Ironworks were built in 1766 by German ironmaster, Peter Haasenclever and operated until 1882. Iron was made here for a wide range of purposes, including manufacturing ammunition for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
Waymark Code: WM2XYW
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 01/07/2008
Views: 63
From the Friends of Long Pond Ironworks website:
The site takes its name from the nearby "Long Pond," a translation of the Native American name for Greenwood Lake. Set alongside the swiftly flowing Wanaque, or "Long Pond" River, the site offered a perfect combination of natural resources -- water power, woods and nearby ore -- for making iron.
From the Friends of Long Pond Ironworks website:
Long Pond Ironworks was founded in 1766 by the German ironmaster Peter Hasenclever. With financial backing from British investors, Hasenclever purchased the existing Ringwood Ironworks as well as huge parcels of land, including the 55,000-acre Long Pond Tract. He also imported more than 500 European workers and their families to build ironmaking plantations at Ringwood, Long Pond and Charlottenburg in New Jersey and at Cortland in New York. From the wilderness they carved roads; built forges, furnaces and homes; and created supporting farms.
At Long Pond, they dammed the river in order to provide water power to operate the air blast for a furnace and a large forge. After a few short years, Hasenclever's investors began to view his plans as too grandiose and expensive. He was replaced as ironmaster in 1769 by the Swiss ironworks manager Johann Jacob Faesch, who later established the Mt. Hope Ironworks in Morris County, and later by the Scottish scientist and inventor Robert Erskine.
At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Erskine took up the American cause, serving as surveyor-general to General George Washington. He also kept the ironworks in operation, and they became important suppliers of armaments and goods to the Continental Army. After Erskine's death in 1781 the ironworks changed hands until they were acquired in 1807 by the Ryersons, owners of the Pompton Ironworks. The family retained ownership until 1853, and the Ryerson Steel Company continues to operate from Chicago to this day.
In 1853, the American industrialists Peter Cooper and Abram S. Hewitt purchased the Long Pond works and operated it as part of their vast, Trenton-based iron empire for the next 30 years. During the Civil War, Cooper and Hewitt built two new furnaces, waterwheels and a casting house at Long Pond, whose iron was found to be especially well suited to making gun barrels for the Union Army.
By the 1870s, the Pennsylvania coal fields and iron mines of the Great Lakes region had become a more cost-effective source of fuel and ore. Although Hewitt planned cost-saving improvements to keep his northern New Jersey ironworks in operation, on April 30, 1882, the last fires were blown at Long Pond Ironworks, ending more than 120 years of ironmaking history.