Information Sheet

 

 

R         Scotia furnace (Crawford County, Mo.).

872                  Photograph, 1911.

                                    One folder.

 

 

 

This is a glass plate negative and copy print of Scotia furnace in Crawford County, Mis­souri.  The Scotia Iron Company of St. Louis built the furnace in 1870 and operated it until 1880.

 

John G. Scott was president and general manager of the Scotia Iron Company; Robert Anderson was the secretary and treasurer.  The furnace at Scotia was said to have been the fifth in Missouri built by Scott.  The company commenced construction of the charcoal iron furnace in January 1870, shipping materials eighty miles by rail from St. Louis to Leasburg, then moving them with teams another seven miles south to the site.  The editor of the Rolla Weekly Herald (12 January 1871) described the furnace as thirty-five feet square at its base.  The stack was forty-one feet high, and the bosh, or working opening at the base, was nine feet, four inches high.  The fur­nace went into blast on 24 August 1870.  Daily capacity of the furnace was twenty tons of pig iron; 2,300 tons were produced during the first month of operation.  Scotia furnace operated in­termittently until it was finally taken out of blast in February 1880.  Most of the machinery at the site was shipped to the new furnace of the Nova Scotia Iron Company, a new firm that included some of the former principals of the Scotia Iron Company.

 

The 5” x 7” glass plate negative of the furnace was made 24 November 1911and is so marked on a paper envelope accompanying the negative.  The photographer is not identified.

 

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