Falling Creek: America's First Iron Furnace
Near Richmond, Virginia
In sixteen nineteen, the Virginia Company of London sent one hundred fifty ironworkers to a spot where Falling Creek dropped into the James River in what is now Chesterfield County. Their task was to build the New World's first industrial iron furnace, turning the local ore, water power, and surrounding timber into a product England badly wanted. By sixteen twenty-one, the blast furnace was in place and an initial iron shipment to England was scheduled for the spring of sixteen twenty-two.
On March twenty-second of that year, Opechancanough led a coordinated Powhatan attack across colonial Virginia. Twenty-seven people at Falling Creek, including women and children, were killed and the ironworks was destroyed. The site is now a small park in Chesterfield County.
The iron was never shipped.
