Rowland Shovel Works: A Century of American Iron

Near this site stood one of early America's most respected tool-making enterprises. Benjamin Rowland Junior founded the mill complex in seventeen ninety-five, and for more than a century the Rowland family produced shovels and spades here of such quality that they earned an international reputation. At a time when "American made" was not yet a guarantee of excellence, the Rowland works helped establish that it could be.

Their reputation reached overseas. The family ran the operation continuously until nineteen hundred and one, when the mill finally closed after more than a hundred years of production. The Rowland house nearby still stands, one of the last late eighteenth-century structures connected to America's early hardware industry, a quiet reminder that the tools that built this country were themselves built somewhere.