The Glendon Iron Company was established in 1842 by Boston businessman Charles Jackson, Jr. as the second anthracite iron furnace in the U.S. William Firmston, an English iron master, put the first furnace into blast in 1844 at a site along Section 8 of the Lehigh Navigation, where canal water power drove the blowing engines. He designed the furnaces and directed their construction after surveying the site with George Haddock. A second furnace was built in 1846, and the works produced over 7,000 tons of iron that year. Like most Lehigh Valley furnaces, Glendon smelted local hematite ore and New Jersey magnetite brought by the Morris Canal and the Lehigh Navigation, and most of its iron went by canal to New York before shipment on coastal schooners to the company's rolling mill near Boston. In the 1850s, Glendon Iron was Pennsylvania's second largest producer of pig iron, using raw materials and shipping goods on the Lehigh Navigation and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, with much of its hematite coming from nearby Williams Township. William Firmstone, born in Wellington, England, in 1810, came to the United States in 1835 with experience gained from his uncles' hot-blast furnaces near Dudley, later worked in Ohio and Pennsylvania, investigated the Lehigh Valley's potential for Charles Jackson, Jr., and helped establish the works, which operated until becoming unprofitable in 1894.