Copake Iron Works

Copake Iron Works. , In 1845, Lemuel Pomeroy II, a prominent gun manufacturer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and his sons, established the Copake Iron Works here at the western edge of the Litchfield Iron District. The site offered all the resources essential for iron manufacturing: dependable water power, high quality iron-ore deposits, limestone, and extensive hardwood forests for charcoal production., The Pomeroys constructed a charcoal-fired blast furnace, a refinery forge, a water-powered trip-hammer, and a dam. They brought in immigrant laborers and donated land and money to build a church. The Copake Iron Works soon became the nucleus of a thriving community served by the New York and Harlem Railroad., Frederick Miles purchased the Copake Works in 1862, and in 1871 he and his sons rebuilt the furnace. Over the next 30 years, they added a large steam engine house, a foundry shed, and charcoal storage barns. In the late 1870’s they built an ironworks railroad to move raw materials around the complex and transport pig iron to the nearby New York and Harlem Railroad tracks., In the 1880’s charcoal iron production in the Litchfield Iron District peaked as high-quality was supplied Northeast foundries. Operations at Copake’s furnace ceased in 1903, when high-capacity, coal-fired steel mills in the Mid-West and South began producing a comparable product at lower cost. The foundry’s operations, however, continued for another 20 years, making specialty castings and plow bottoms for William A. Miles’s Copake Plow Works., New York State purchased the property in 1928, and it became part of newly created Taconic State park. Soon after, the frame buildings enclosing the blast furnace and the foundry were torn down, and portions of the furnace’s marble block were removed and used to build retaining walls along the road to Bash Bish Falls