Iron artifact tucked in the woods

Taconic State Park in North East, N.Y., has lots to explore beyond the tent and trailer campgrounds, picnic spots, Rudd Pond swimming beach and playground. 

With little difficulty, for example, I found a brush-hidden connection to local iron industry history.

The pond takes its name from an early inhabitant, Reuben Rudd, son of the delightfully named Bezaleel Rudd and his wife, the former Ruth Brush. The elder Rudds migrated from Greenwich, Conn., to Great Nine Partners in about 1765, and homesteaded in northwest Amenia. Their son settled in North East in about 1820, near what became known as Rudd Pond.

The Rudd family had little to do with the later industrial history of the Rudd Pond environs. But some Dakinses did.

“This section of the country is rich in iron ore,” according to James H. Smith in his 1882 “History of the Town of North East.” “Numerous valuable mines have been opened and worked,the iron yielded being particularly adapted to certain of the mechanical arts. The Dakin Ore bed, one of the most prominent of those found in this section, was discovered in 1846 by Henry and Gideon Dakin, sons of Orville Dakin, on land owned by the latter. They at once sunk shafts for mining the ore, and a company was forged to develop the industry.”

Moses C. Wells, Phineas Chapin and Charles C. Alger formed Dutchess County Iron Co. and acquired from Orville Dakin 10 acres of land next to the ore bed. It was just south of Rudd Pond. In 1848 they built a furnace and ran it for two years before their business failed. 

Alger was a busy iron man, active with furnaces in Cornwall, Conn., Stockbridge, Mass., and Hudson, N.Y. He soon moved on.

Orville Dakin next took over the company and ran it for six years, until he, too, failed. Silas Harris, Henry C. Myers, Cornelius Husted and George Barton held the property, then George Morgan (he called it Phoenix Furnace). 

It went idle again in 1861. 

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Caleb S. Maltby had better success with the iron furnace than his predecessors. It was the time of the Civil War and demand for pig iron was sufficient that Maltby rebuilt  the bosh in 1863 and restarted production. 

Returning to North East, “The Maltby Furnace or ‘stack’ was made of rubble and mortar and the oven seated on top of it was of brick, 9 feet square, 8 feet high to the springing line and 12 and one-half feet high at the crown of the arch,” according to George A. Armstrong Jr. in the Harlem Valley Times for Aug. 24, 1987. 

Malty closed in 1884, though Thomas Iron Co. extracted ore from the mine for another nine years, according to Armstrong. 

There are no buildings remaining from those iron days. To find the ruins of the furnace (which sits in plain view if you know where to look), you have to go navigate dense undergrowth to come upon ... a mound of stone and rubble. 

I visited during warmer weather. I left my car in the state park parking lot, walked east on Beige Road, stepped across the small clearing and aimed for the hillside. I found some nifty turkey and vulture feathers as I wrestled with the tangled undergrowth. This isn’t a recommended path. But it gets you to the tumble-of-rocks ruins.

The sanctioned trails from the parking lot lead to a small pond and beyond. 

There’s another whole section of Taconic State Park, for the unaware, a few miles up Route 22 in Copake Falls. It also has camping and recreation and is centered around another old iron furnace and mine, with the added feature of Bash Bish Falls nearby.

Maltby, by the way, has a lake named for him. Three, in fact. They’re in New Haven, part of a municipal water supply he constructed for Fair Haven Water Co. just before he took over the  iron furnace in North East. Maltby Lakes are part of a state park.

The writer is a longtime member of the Society for Industrial Archaeology and an associate editor of this newspaper.