Ledger, Day Book and Account Book for Providence Iron Works, Brownsville Pa, 1833-1836
Brownsville PA: Providence Iron Works, 1833-1836. Hardcover. Quarto, 12 x 8 inches, leather backed boards, fair copy, recent cloth covering spine, boards heavily rubbed with must of the paper covering the gray card covers now gone. With old handwritten label on front cover. Contents good to very good, some tanning, toning and small stains, but readable, intact, no tears or real problems. 443 pp. Handwritten. Begins with the agreement between Arthur Palmer and Isaac Miller to form a partnership on April 1, 1833 and ends on July 30, 1836. Plus an agreement between Miller & Palmer and Thomas Danks (?) to superintend and manage the Iron Works at a salary of $350 a year. The ledger gives all items of expenses and incomes, and has a wealth of information on the economics of the iron industry in Western Pennsylvania, including the purchase & sale of pig iron and pig metal, coal, bar iron, castings and blooms, lard for engines, pudling materials, sperm oil for engines, roller and rolling nails, scap metal, bricks, cast steel, etc. and also includes information on wages for rollers, enginemen, puddlers, refiners and day labor. Probably upwards of 9000 individual entries. Providence Iron Works also incorporated the Union Forge in Dunbar and Isaac Meason's Plumsock works in Upper Middletown (which came on the market when Meason died and was purchased by Arthur Palmer in 1824), the first rolling mills west of the Alleghenies -- many of the entries are from the Union Forge and are identified as such. The business lasted from 1833-1836, and took advantage of its 400 feet of acreage fronting the Monongahela River, and took many tons of pig iron from the Union, Fairchance and Redstone furnaces. We don't think the Palmer-Miller partnership lasted past 1836, when it was put up for sale. At the time it was on sale, the works included a rolling mill and nail factory, a ball furnace, a puddling furance, a refinery, a coke oven, a large bloom hammer and nine pairs of finishing rolls, and a steam engine of "great power." Excellent primary history! Fair. Item #H25206
Price: $850.00