Coatesville and Lukens Steel

Coatesville in Chester County is home to what is believed to be the oldest continuously operating steel mill in the United States. The Brandywine Iron Works and Nail Factory was founded here in eighteen ten by Quakers Isaac Pennock and Jesse Kersey, and its furnaces have been running in some form ever since. The company's early breakthrough was manufacturing the first rolled boiler plate iron in the country.

But the defining chapter came after tragedy. When Dr. Charles Lloyd Lukens, Pennock's son-in-law, died in eighteen twenty-five, his widow Rebecca Webb Lukens took over the business.

She became the first female chief executive of an industrial company in the United States, pulled the mill back from bankruptcy, and built it into the nation's leading boiler plate producer. The company bore the Lukens name until it was absorbed by a larger corporation in the nineteen nineties. The mill still runs today, more than two hundred years after those Quaker partners first lit the forge.