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The late sixteenth century saw the
appearance of the blast furnace, a much larger structure
with a stronger draught that raised the temperature
sufficiently to melt the metal to produce cast iron. At the
time people wanted a malleable iron, and so the brittle cast
iron was reheated and hammered in a finery forge on a
charcoal hearth, then further treated in a chafery forge to
produce bar iron. The first blast furnace to operate in the
area opened in 1582 at West Bromwich near the boundary with
Handsworth. It was run by Thomas Parkes, who also built a
forge nearby on the River Tame.
It would be a long time before others
followed, possibly because of the lack of sufficient
charcoal. The new form of iron was exploited at Wednesbury
in Wood Green by William Comberford and his partner William
Whorwood who had a water-powered forge, with a finery and chafery, beside the River Tame at Wood Green. Two of the
employees were Blaise Uyntam, a finer, and William Heeley, a
hammer man. In 1606 Walter Coleman leased the forge for 21
years, and in 1708 it was owned by Richard Shelton and
leased to John Willetts, who probably used it as a rolling
mill.
The power came from two water sources,
which were dammed, and drove waterwheels from the
floodgates. The wheels would power a large hammer consisting
of a timber beam bound with iron hoops called ‘the helve’,
set in an iron pivot known as ‘the hurst’. A cast-iron head
weighing 7 or 8 cwt would be fitted to the end of the helve,
and this would fall onto the iron bloom placed on the anvil
below. The hammer was operated by cams and large wooden pegs
fixed in a drum. At intervals, the iron would be removed from
the anvil and reheated, before the process could continue.
Eventually it would become wrought iron. In the chafery the heated
wrought iron was hammered and drawn out into various widths
and lengths of bar suitable for blacksmiths, coopers, nail
makers, toolmakers, and wheelwrights. This forge was
possibly the forge later known as Wednesbury Forge, run for
many years by the Elwell family.
Similar mills were set up alongside the
River Tame at Perry Barr by Whorwood and Parkes, also at
Bustleholme Mill in West Bromwich, Holford Forge near Witton,
and Aston Furnace.
Iron was also produced at Rushall,
Cannock Chase, and Middleton. The ore in Walsall and the
Rushall area produced the best tough iron, whereas the ores
in Wednesbury produced ‘cold short’ iron, which when mixed
with the tough iron produced ‘blend metal’. Although the
local ores were used, much of the iron produced at this time
was smelted using ores from other areas.
In the seventeenth century attempts
were made to smelt iron using coal, because of the acute
shortage of charcoal. Experiments were carried out by Simon
Sturtevant in 1612, and Dud Dudley in 1619 to 1621, but
nothing came of them. In 1675 Frederick de Blewstone from
Germany constructed an experimental furnace in Wednesbury,
but the attempt failed because of contamination from the
sulphurous gasses emitted by the coal.
In the eighteenth century everything
began to change after Abraham Darby from Sedgley opened his
ironworks at Coalbrookdale and began to smelt iron using
coke. The problem locally was that the thick coal is
non-coking, and suitable deeper coal could not be mined
because of constant flooding. A problem that was not
overcome until the proliferation of mine pumping engines,
and Henry Cort’s invention of the coal-burning reverbatory
puddling furnace in the 1780s. |
