David Allen arrived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the mid-eighteenth century and built a sawmill, supplying pine boards to Moravian settlements in 1768 and 1769. After the state land office opened in 1777, he bought land and by 1782 had acquired 2,482 acres on adjoining tracts in southwest Surry County and eastern Wilkes County. Using abundant timber, water power, and local iron ore, Allen established iron production on Big Elkin Creek, where workers smelted ore in a bloomery furnace and refined it into wrought iron bars. Great Britain's 1750 restrictions on iron manufacturing in the colonies and North Carolina's 1775 offer of bonuses for blast furnaces made such production especially important, and Moravian records show the first documented output from Allen's forge in 1776. In 1781 the North Carolina House of Commons exempted 12 forge employees from military service because iron production was vital during the war against Great Britain. Allen sold his property and iron interests to William Hill in 1786, and during the following decades the forge was managed by Hill, Jonathan Haines, and a Mr. Martin; maps of 1798 and 1808 identified it as the Martin Iron Works, and court records in 1802 reported that more than 5,000 pounds of iron had been made there that year. The operation ended sometime after 1802 and before 1830, and the site later supported a grist mill, a cotton mill, and eventually larger manufacturing enterprises because of its favorable water power, transportation access, and location at the junction of a smaller deep river with a larger one.