Muirkirk: Iron Made by Unfree Hands
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
The community of Muirkirk, just off Route One in Prince George's County, looks like an ordinary patch of Maryland suburb today. But under this ground and woven into the families who still live nearby is one of the most layered stories of labor, race, and industrial America in the mid-Atlantic.
In eighteen forty-seven, a pair of entrepreneurs named Andrew and Elias Ellicott purchased land from the Snowden family and built the Muirkirk Furnace, a charcoal iron operation that drew on vast deposits of iron ore locked in the dense clay soils of the Patuxent basin. In eighteen sixty it changed hands again, passing to a Boston manufacturer named William Coffin, whose son Charles would run it until his death in nineteen twelve under the name Muirkirk Ironworks.
The furnace ran for more than seven decades, from eighteen forty-seven to nineteen twenty. And throughout those years, the workforce that made it run was overwhelmingly Black.
Before the Civil War, enslaved people performed nearly every phase of iron production here. They dug the ore from the clay, fed the kilns, worked as founders, blacksmiths, and foremen. They lived in company housing just behind the furnace buildings. Maryland did not emancipate enslaved people until eighteen sixty-four, a full year after the Emancipation Proclamation, which applied only to Confederate states.
After freedom came, remarkably little changed at Muirkirk. The same families stayed. The owners continued to provide housing, a company store run on credit, and schools for workers' children, arrangements that offered security but also kept laborers economically bound to the site. When the ironworks finally shut down in nineteen twenty, the community scattered into three distinct neighborhoods, the Grove near Laurel, Bacontown to the north in Anne Arundel County, and Rossville just to the east of the old furnace.
The African American ironworkers of Muirkirk are among the forgotten industrial laborers of the mid-Atlantic. Their story is preserved in a historical marker at Dinosaur Park, just steps from where the furnace once roared.
