Ross Valve: a Troy foundry since 1879

Ross Valve has made water flow control valves in Troy, New York, since 1879, and the sixth generation of the founding family still owns and operates the company. This page sets out what the shop builds today, what separates a foundry from a forge, and why this firm is still at work when the iron works that surrounded it are not.

George Ross and valves designed to last

In 1879 George Ross founded a company in Troy to make water flow control valves that, in the firm's own telling, were designed to last. The same history names what the founder wanted the business to hold to: integrity of design and engineering, quality of materials, craftsmanship in valve manufacturing, a high level of customer service, and business systems flexible enough to change with technology and with the industries served. Language like this is common on company pages. Living long enough to test the promise is not. Ross Valve is now a sixth generation, family owned and operated business, still located in the city where it started, and its tagline is a plain date: quality and innovation since 1879.

What does a foundry do that a forge does not?

Most of this journal lives on the hammer side of the iron trade, so the line is worth drawing. Forging shapes metal with localized compressive forces, blows from a hammer or a die, and the smith's skill is in the sequence and placement of those blows. Work the metal above its recrystallization temperature and it is hot forging; work it near room temperature and it is cold forging, which hardens the piece as it forms. A foundry works the other way around. Liquid metal goes into a mold that fixes the form, so the skill sits in the pattern, the melt and the pour. The virtues differ: forged parts generally run about 20 percent higher in strength to weight than cast or machined parts of the same material, while a casting buys shape and repetition that no hammer offers.

The metal that takes any shape a pattern gives

Cast iron is the foundry's historic metal, and its character explains both its century and its limits. Brittle and low in tensile strength beside steel and wrought iron, it was a poor choice wherever a part is pulled or bent. In compression it is strong, which is why the cast iron columns of nineteenth-century mills could be extremely slender next to masonry carrying similar weight, saving floor after floor of factory space. It also takes whatever a mold gives it, so ornament came far cheaper than carved stone. The Wikipedia article on cast iron in buildings follows the material from Chinese pagodas to the facades of SoHo. One figure fixes the scale: the dome of the United States Capitol, built between 1855 and 1866, is made entirely of cast iron, nearly 9 million pounds of it, about 4,100 metric tons.

Why did the casting century close?

Two other materials ended it. The puddling process, patented in 1784, produced a structural grade of wrought iron at relatively low cost, and wrought iron carries tension well; it became the material for beams, rails, ships and bridges, often paired with cast iron in the compression roles. Steel was better still, and the new steelmaking processes of the late nineteenth century pushed its cost below that of wrought iron. Frames of cast and wrought iron became steel frames, the essential step toward the skyscraper. Cast iron faded as a structural material around 1900 and as a decorative one soon after, displaced by steel and concrete. The foundry did not die with the facade. The pouring moved into products that never had to be fashionable, and valves are among them.

The neighbors are gone, the address is not

The stretch of the Hudson between Albany and Troy was, for about seventy years, one of the densest concentrations of iron making in the United States. Horseshoes, railroad spikes, the plate of an ironclad and valves all left its works. Most of those works are gone, and some of the buildings are not. Two of the neighbors have pages of their own in this journal: the works that turned out horseshoes at a rate of one a second, and the plate of the ironclad Monitor. Ross Valve belongs to the small set that needs no past tense. It never left Troy, it added a second facility in 2004, and one family has owned and operated it for six generations.

What leaves 102nd Street today

The catalogue runs to flow control valves, pressure control valves and cone valves, plus pressure reducing, pump control, surge anticipating, relief, altitude and float valves, metal seated ball valves, and flap gates. The industries the company lists read like a map of water and ore: municipal water, wastewater, fire fighting, hydro power, district cooling, industrial mining. All of it is manufactured in the United States, and the company states that its products comply with the American Iron and Steel Act and the No Lead in Drinking Water Act. The Troy factory also takes repair and modification work on valves of any size. The pages say a good deal about engineering, including the fluid modeling software used to check a valve against a customer's operating conditions, and rather less about the casting floor itself. The company does not publish its process, and this journal will not guess at it.

How does a shop reach a sixth generation?

Long survival usually has a plain explanation, and here the company writes it down itself: it adapted continually to advances in industry and technology while holding the founder's standards. The visible marks of that adaptation are the second facility opened in 2004, the modeling software in the engineering work, and a repair trade that runs alongside new production. None of it is dramatic, and that is the point. The plant stands at 79 102nd Street in Troy, a working building rather than a plaque, in a valley whose iron works mostly survive as photographs and foundations. Walk past it, look up at the walls, and you are looking at the iron trade of this valley in the one form in which it kept going.