First Iron Rails - Danville; Montour County
Montour Iron Works is no longer standing, but is depicted in the historical image below. It is also showcased on the side
of a building situated at Walnut and Mill Streets in Danville. Its creation began in 1838 when Thomas
Anyone who’s been reading my blog (or any of the other countless sources of information about our commonwealth) for a while knows that Pennsylvania is full of firsts. During my visit to Montour County earlier this year, I encountered this one, which is probably one of the lesser-known firsts, but railroad enthusiasts might be familiar with it. Railroading in the United States dates back to around 1830, at which time the first locomotives were brought here from Europe. By that point, railroads had been in general use in England’s northeast landscape for roughly twenty years. These earliest trains were drawn by horses (hence the use of the term even today of “horsepower”), and then later engines used steam or, more commonly, coal. Railroad tracks, meanwhile, were another story, and they’re the focus of this week’s quest. The crafting of rail iron in Danville can be traced back to Col. Robert L. Stevens, an en- gineer who was president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad when it was founded in 1830. At that time, railroad tracks were made of wood, usually pine, and the weight and fre- quency of trains caused them to deteriorate quickly. Some of these wooden rails had trips of flat iron attached to them. Stevens, howev- er, urged the C&A to adopt the use of all-iron rails. The only problem was that in the United States, there were no mills which could pro- duce the rails he had in mind, so he had to travel all the way to England to purchase what he wanted. Stevens devised a form which is known as a T rail. These flanged rails were given the name because they resembled an inverted capital letter T. He also created a hook-headed spike to fasten the T rails to the wooden ties, and rails were connected by what he called an “iron tongue.” His first order of T rails arrived in Philadelphia from England in May of 1831 and were placed on their tracks in this manner. Al- though modern railways use fishplate connec- tors, and fasten their rails with the use of screw spikes instead of hooked spikes, the T rail be- came the standard form of rail used across the United States and has remained so ever since. Of course, ordering the T rails from England was both costly and time-consuming, so there gradually developed a need to manufacture them here in the U.S. It was in Danville that, in 1845, the first iron T rails were rolled at the Montour Iron Works. Whether these were ac- tually the first ones made in the entire country is a subject of some debate, as the community of Mount Savage in Maryland also makes that claim; but Montour’s were, if nothing else, the first T rails manufactured in Pennsylvania.
Chambers, a local industrialist, purchased a large quantity of land belonging to Alexander Montgomery, a son of William Montgomery. Chambers was familiar with iron smelting and wanted to set up furnaces that could create pig iron. He partnered with E. R. Biddle, the president of New Jersey’s Morris Canal, to buy a furnace in 1840 and adapt it for this purpose. After a few years’ worth of learning
curve, the Montour Iron Works was off and running. In 1844 they added their first rolling mill, which at
the time was the largest in the country. The first T rails were produced on October 8, 1845, and the design took the highest honor at the Manufacturing Exhibition at
Above: The Montour County Iron Works, circa 1860.
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