Ivanhoe Furnace

Southwestern Virginia’s abundant natural resources brought settlement and transportation to the area, helped supply wars, and provided essential building materials for a growing nation. Just over a hundred years ago, this peaceful forested tract held the Ivanhoe Furnace, one of the region’s dangerous and volatile blast furnaces that provided jobs, encouraged transportation and settlement, and fueled the local economy. Believed to have been built by the Hendricks Brothers Company, the furnace went into blast the last of April 1882 and produced ten tons of iron per day before falling into poor condition in the early 1910s and shutting down soon after. A blast furnace was a huge steel stack lined with refractory brick, where iron ore, coke, and limestone were dumped into the top and preheated air was blasted into the bottom to convert these materials into liquid iron, which was then poured into a long tray with smaller inlets resembling a sow and piglets and called pig iron.

Ivanhoe, Virginia · United States