Nathaniel Moody and John Pepper built Moody’s Tunnel Iron Works here in 1843, and Reuben Golding, who formed the Stokes Iron Mining Company, purchased the works in 1854 before he and his partners incorporated the Moratock Mining and Manufacturing Company in 1862. During the Civil War, the Confederacy relied on small rural ironworks for the metals needed to manufacture cannons, swords, and firearms, and this furnace was typical of the charcoal blast furnaces operated throughout the North Carolina piedmont. Using charcoal made from local trees and local iron-ore deposits, it produced pig iron and cast iron. In early April 1865, Union Gen. George Stoneman’s cavalry moved south from Virginia through Danbury and put the ironworks out of commission. Expecting resistance in Stokes County, Stoneman found none and soon learned that Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army in Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9. The furnace operated intermittently after 1870 until it closed in the 1890s.