Australia Furnace, located just east of here, produced pig iron for the Tredegar Iron Works during the Civil War. Ira and Edwin Jordan began constructing the furnace in 1852 and put it in operation two years later. It was a hot blast furnace that used preheated air in smelting iron from ore to increase production. Northern ironmasters adopted this relatively simple technology before those in the South, and cold-blast furnaces, which generally used water-powered bellows to pump air without preheating, could not compete, with some closing in the 1850s. When the Civil War cut off trade with Northern iron manufacturers, the Confederacy had to rely more heavily on Southern suppliers. To secure a dependable flow of raw materials, Confederate Gen. Joseph R. Anderson, owner of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, purchased several ironworks, including Australia Furnace, in April 1862. Workers used a steam engine both to preheat the air and to operate the bellows, giving Australia Furnace an advantage over furnaces that depended only on water power, which might fail in winter or during dry summers. At Tredegar, Anderson employed both free white labor and black slave labor, and at Australia enslaved workers held every furnace job from common laborers to skilled engineers. Wagons carried Australia's pig iron to the James River and Kanawha Canal near Eagle Rock, where boats transported it to Tredegar to be cast or forged into cannons, munitions, and railroad equipment.