The Ardis Furnace
Wisconsin
Near Iron Mountain, the crumbling concrete pillars you see are all that remain of the Ardis Furnace, a bold industrial experiment that failed spectacularly. In nineteen oh eight, local inventor John T. Jones built a rotating blast furnace here to process low-grade iron ore using a method he called the Step Furnace Process.
The tube ran one hundred twenty feet long, eight feet wide, and turned slowly on electric power. Jones named it for his daughter Ardis. The design was visionary on paper, but mechanical problems plagued every attempt to run it profitably.
Within a couple of years Jones had spent his fortune and the project was abandoned. Today the Michigan Department of Natural Resources protects the remnants as a state historic site, and the National Register of Historic Places recognized the Ardis Furnace in nineteen seventy-two, leaving behind a monument to ambition and ore that refused to cooperate.
