Irondale

In 1876, Gray's Atlas of Essex County recorded improvements in Irondale after the Crown Point Iron Company built a narrow gauge railroad to carry ore from the mines to its new foundry complex on Lake Champlain, where the path from town to the bridge crossed the new rail line. For nearly fifty years, a plank bridge supported by rock-cribbed piers carried foot traffic and charcoal carts to homes and charcoal sheds on the far side of Putt's Creek. After 1888, when the Brooklyn Bridge opened with Crown Point iron in its suspension cables, the worker's hamlet across the pond was dubbed "Brooklyn" and the span became known as "The Bridge to Brooklyn." Ironville was a focal point of the Adirondack iron industry for more than seventy years, and as a by-product of that industry it became the site of the first industrial use of electricity and indirectly participated in the birth of the electric motor. In 1974, the entire hamlet of Ironville was designated a Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. The Penfield Homestead Museum's properties include the Homestead, the parsonage, the church, the former Penfield farm and barns, the mill pond, and the site of the Crown Point Iron Company's iron works along Putnam Creek.

Crown Point, New York · United States