Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

The iron industry was one of the very first kinds of
manufacturing established in the American colonies. The
colonists needed iron tools, pots, nails, and other hardware in
order to build homes and cultivate crops. Massachusetts had
vast forests, which could supply charcoal—a key ingredient in
smelting, refining, and forging—as well as a supply of “bog
iron”—iron oxide deposits that formed in wetlands. The
English iron industry, by contrast, was limited by its dwindling
forests. The Saugus Ironworks, located a short distance north
of Boston, began operating in 1646 and produced cast iron as
well as more refined wrought iron on an impressive scale until
the 1670s. A working reconstruction of this pioneering factory
complex based on archaeological excavations (as well as the
original slag pile) is run by the National Park Service and is
open to the public.
After Saugus closed, smaller iron foundries grew up to
serve local and regional markets for cast and wrought iron.
Southeastern Massachusetts, with its many bogs and acres of
forest, became known for its foundries. The development of
cast iron stoves in the 1700s was a further stimulus to the
industry. The growing American iron industry worried the
English government, which attempted to stifle this growth by
passing the Iron Act in 1750; but it was not strictly observed.
With independence came further growth to meet the needs of
the public as well as the military. The Highland Foundry was
part of New England’s great nineteenth-century industrial
expansion. The Highland Foundry provides an example of a
foundry in an urban environment, where industry, housing, and
transportation grew and affected one another. The dramatic
growth of industry in the nineteenth century is rightly termed a
“revolution” because it revolutionized the ways people worked,
lived, and consumed. The Highland Foundry was a part of that.
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Today’s urban setting of the Highland Foundry site is
the Stoney Brook Valley, along the banks of the brook. This
was pasture and crop land during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. There wasn’t even a road through the
valley. This pastoral landscape changed in the early 1800s
when the Boston and Providence Railroad was built through
the area. In 1847, Joseph Pratt and George Bowers opened a
foundry here. Pratt and Bowers both came from Carver,
Massachusetts, which was at the time located in the heart of
Massachusetts’ iron industry.
Pratt and Bowers were successful for a time. They
benefitted from their location between the brook, which could
be harnessed for power, and the railroad, by which their
products could be shipped to markets. But Stoney Brook
proved an unstable power source and was prone to flooding.
When the brook was
rerouted and the nearby
millpond drained in 1868,
the foundry had to be
completely rebuilt. Things
seemed to be looking up in
1870 when Joseph Pratt and
his current partner James H.
Wentworth received a patent
for an improved cooking
stove, but finances proved
their eventual undoing and
in 1876 the Highland
Foundry Company bought
them out.
The Peerless Cooking Stove was made by the Pratt and
Wentworth Company in this foundry during the 1870s