Heritage
Iron still standing in the Capital District
Five places, all within a short drive of Troy, where the iron trade of the Hudson valley is still visible rather than merely recorded.
Between roughly 1830 and 1900 the few miles of the Hudson between Albany and Troy held one of the heaviest concentrations of iron working in the United States. Water power came down from the Wynantskill and the Poestenkill, ore and coal came up the river and the canal, and what left again was horseshoes, spikes, valves, stoves and armour plate. Most of the works are gone. This page is a guide to the five that are not.
Why this survey exists at this address
A version of this survey stood at this exact address for twenty years, put together by the association that used to publish here. We are not that association, as the resources page sets out, and we have not reproduced their text, their photographs or their contact details. What we have kept is the idea, which was a good one: the ironwork of this valley is unusually accessible, and nobody had made a list.
The five entries
Two of them are about making iron on an industrial scale. Burden Iron Works in Troy is where Henry Burden's horseshoe machine, patented in the 1830s, turned out sixty shoes a minute, and where the old company office building now holds a museum run by the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway. The Rensselaer and Albany iron works belonged to Corning and Winslow, described in their own time as the largest iron producers in the United States, and some of the iron for the ironclad USS Monitor was made at their Albany works in Troy.
One is still working. Ross Valve in Troy has been casting and machining water valves on the same site for well over a century, which makes it the rarest thing on this list: a foundry you can hear rather than read about.
One is a building. The Watervliet Arsenal cast iron building, put up in 1859 on an arsenal founded in 1813, is a prefabricated iron structure of a kind that was briefly sold the way furniture is sold, by the component and out of a catalogue.
A sixth entry stood on the old version of this page and does not stand on ours: the cast iron staircase of the former Frear department store in Troy. We looked for a published source on it in September 2026 and found none that we could stand behind, so we did not write the page. Its old address now points back here rather than to something invented.
The last is modern, and it is the most ambitious forged ironwork in the state. Albert Paley's portal gates, made in 1980 for the New York State Senate chamber at the Capitol in Albany, are what happens when the craft described on the rest of this site is pushed as far as it will go.
Before you go
Two of these sit on active industrial or military property and are not open on a whim, one is a working foundry, and one museum on this list closed in 2013. We deliberately publish no opening times, telephone numbers or contact names: those change, and a stale one wastes your afternoon. Check with the institution itself before travelling. If a detail on any of these pages is wrong, tell the desk.