Eddyville Furnace, also called Jim and I, was a brick blast furnace for smelting iron with charcoal fuel, built in 1832 by John and Samuel Stacker and Thomas Tennessee Watson. It was later owned by members of the Cobb family and then by William Kelly, inventor of the so-called Bessemer process for making steel. Much of its iron was forged at Kuttawa, and its last blast was about 1850. Kentucky had been a major iron producer since 1791, ranking third in the United States in the 1830s and eleventh in 1965. Charcoal timber, native ore, and limestone supplied numerous furnaces in the Hanging Rock, Red River, Between Rivers, Rolling Fork, and Green River regions, where pig iron, utensils, and munitions were made. The old charcoal furnace era ended with depletion of ore and timber and the growth of railroads.