Caney Fork Furnace

Caney Fork Furnace. . This stone stack marks the eastern-most site of a significant state industry that ran along the Western Highland Rim where 33 iron furnaces were in blast by 1847. Tennessee produced over 50,000 tons of pig iron by 1856, and often led the south in production before 1860. By 1832, Moses Speer was operating this industrial site on 2000 acres near the Caney Fork creek. Skilled and unskilled laborers including enslaved peoples worked under a hierarchy governed by the ironmaster. Speer's operation was economically unsuccessful, and the property soon defaulted to Rev. Thomas L. Douglass. The furnace was not in blast by 1848 or after when the property was sold by the heirs of Nicholas Perkins. The Rocky River Coal and Lumber Company bought the land in the 1920s for timber and the Harrison family farmed here beginning in the 1930s. The furnace stack survives as the county's only remnant of an industry that peaked in the 1850s and it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. , When in operation, the furnace would have looked much like its contemporary, Bear Spring Furnace in Stewart County, which was also put into blast in 1832.