Keeseville: Horseshoe Nails and Sandstone Streets

Keeseville sits where the Ausable River drops through a gorge, and in the early eighteen hundreds that waterfall was an industrial engine. Permanent settlers arrived around eighteen oh eight, drawn by the power potential of Anderson Falls. A sawmill and grist mill appeared by eighteen twelve. By eighteen fifteen an iron rolling mill had made the settlement a serious industrial place, and the community took the name Keeseville.

At its peak the village was home to the Au Sable Horse Nail Company, established around eighteen fifty-two, and the Ausable Chasm Horse Nail Works, founded in eighteen sixty-three, which together produced up to two tons of horseshoe nails per day. When those works closed in nineteen twenty-five, a chapter ended. What remained was a remarkable built environment: the majority of structures from the eighteen twenty-five to eighteen eighty boom period survive today, many built from locally quarried Ausable River sandstone. Keeseville's historic district is one of the best-preserved mid-nineteenth-century industrial villages in upstate New York.