Heritage
Burden Iron Works: a horseshoe every second
For half a century the shoes on a large share of the horses in the United States were punched out in south Troy.
In 1822 Henry Burden took charge of the Troy Iron and Nail Factory, on the north bank of the Wynantskill in South Troy, a half mile northeast of today’s Troy-Menands bridge. He was thirty-one, a farmer’s son from Dunblane who had studied engineering at Edinburgh, and the works he came to superintend still depended on hands at the fire. He became sole owner, renamed it H. Burden and Sons, and, one account of his life says, spent a lifetime devising means for lightening toil. The machines are half of what follows, the wheel that drove them the other half.
A farmer’s son with a drawing board
Burden was born in Dunblane, Scotland, on April 22, 1791, and emigrated in 1819. His first American employer was the Townsend and Corning foundry in Albany, which cast plows and other farm implements. Within a year he had an improved plow and a cultivator, the latter said to be the first in practical operation in the country. The pattern held: he did not simply make products, he built machines for making them, and he held twelve patents.
What did the machines take over?
Spikes, until Burden’s patent of May 1825, were made by hand. The horseshoe machine he designed in 1835 turned out sixty shoes a minute, one every second, and they were the first horseshoes made by machinery in the world. A smith sets that number against the short list of things a hot bar allows: lengthen it, upset it, bend it, cut it, punch it, join it. Every shoe ever shaped at an anvil began with those moves, starting with drawing out and upsetting. The machines did not lengthen the list; they took the repetition out of it. The same habit produced a hook-headed spike, used on nearly every railroad in the United States, and a rotary squeezer taken up across America and Europe.
Why build a wheel sixty-two feet across?
Power was the constraint, and the Wynantskill is a small stream. Burden answered with reservoirs along the creek to hold water in reserve, then in 1851 with the wheel itself: 62 feet (19 m) in diameter, 22 feet (6.7 m) broad, 250 tons (about 227 tonnes) of iron, producing 500 horsepower at two and a half turns a minute. It was a suspension wheel, its iron rods in tension replacing the usual arms. Larger wheels existed in Britain; this one appears to have carried more buckets, and a local poet called it “the Niagara of Water-Wheels.” It ran night and day for close to half a century, then stood idle for two more decades before it collapsed. It is widely believed that George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. studied it as a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; his own wheel followed in 1893. The full record is in the Wikipedia article on the works.
Two works and a mile of river
Troy sat at a junction of rail and water routes, and Burden bought accordingly: nearly a mile (1.6 km) of Hudson frontage, with the Hudson River Railroad along the east side. Because the river there was shallow and full of bars, and the low ground flooded, he had the site filled in and the channel dredged, at great expense, until the docks could take large vessels. The upper works on the Wynantskill held a rolling mill and puddling forge, the horseshoe factory, and a warehouse sized for 7,000 tons (about 6,350 tonnes) of shoes. The lower works, the steam mills nearer the river, held two blast furnaces each 65 feet (20 m) high, besides a foundry, a machine shop and a pattern shop.
The count around 1880
Around 1880 the works employed 1,400 men, burned 90,000 tons (about 82,000 tonnes) of coal a year, and shipped 600,000 kegs of horseshoes, packed 100 pounds (45 kg) to the keg, alongside 42,000 tons (about 38,000 tonnes) of iron. Horseshoe sales alone ran near two million dollars a year.
| Item | Count |
|---|---|
| Puddling furnaces | 60 |
| Heating furnaces | 20 |
| Trains of rolls | 14 |
| Rotary squeezers | 3 |
| Horseshoe machines | 9 |
| Rivet machines | 12, at 80 rivets a minute each |
| Steam engines | 10 large and 15 small |
| Boilers | 70 |
Who stood at the furnaces
The puddling furnaces employed hundreds of men, stripped to the waist, in hob-nailed shoes and coal dust. Boys worked the swaging furnaces, lifting heated shoes with tongs onto the revolving swaging dies. Puddling counted because of the material: the process, patented in 1784, yielded a structural grade of wrought iron at relatively low cost, and wrought iron, tough rather than brittle, was the preferred material for rails, ships and beams. Cast iron, strong mainly in compression, went into what could be shaped in a mold. It mattered wherever iron had to be joined rather than poured, the business described on the page about forge welding.
Plate for an ironclad, an office for a museum
Burden was among the first to propose iron plate for seagoing warships and sent specimen plates to Glasgow for testing. His company forged the hull plates of the USS Monitor, the Navy’s first ironclad, which met the Merrimac in 1862, and served as the Union Army’s chief horseshoe producer. The survivor on the ground today is the office building, a brick Romanesque Revival structure of 1881 and 1882, listed on the National Register in 1972, ahead of the works site itself in 1977. It houses an exhibit on Greater Troy’s industrial history, operated by the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway, and, as the encyclopedia notes, is open by appointment only. Make that appointment. Before going, pull up the Historic American Engineering Record surveys the same page lists, five sets catalogued under HAER No. NY-7, so you know what you are walking past.
en.wikipedia.org: the encyclopedia entry on the Burden Iron Works holds both National Register listings, the wheel’s dimensions, the buildings of the upper and lower works, and the machine counts, with a separate biography of Henry Burden alongside.