Company
AbsorbedThe Coalbrookdale works
Coalbrookdale · 1709 – 1929
The company passed into a larger foundry group in 1929. The valley is now the Ironbridge Gorge Museum.
In 1709 Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster, succeeded in smelting iron ore with coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. Charcoal had limited where a furnace could stand, because the trees ran out. Coal, turned to coke, did not. The furnace could grow.
The works cast pots, then parts, then, in 1779, the ribs of the Iron Bridge, the first large bridge made of cast iron. A valley of furnaces, forges, and plateways became a landscape organized around one material.
The furnace as an employer
A coke furnace does not stop for the season. It needs fillers, keepers, moulders, and the carters who brought ore and took pots away. Darby's descendants ran the Coalbrookdale Company as a family firm and trained a local workforce that knew iron the way a wool town knew cloth. The jobs were hot, skilled, and tied to the site. You did not take a furnace home.
From company to museum
The company continued long after the Darbys, and in 1929 it was absorbed into Allied Ironfounders. Production on the historic site ended over the following decades. The Iron Bridge and the furnaces are now the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, a place that exhibits the work the company used to pay for. Few firms in this catalogue end as their own exhibit. This one did.
The work it organized
- Furnace keeper
- Moulder
- Pattern maker
- Carter
On the timeline
Related
- Boulton & WattDissolved