Not a building. A system.

If you're looking for the Reading Iron Company on a map, you'll be disappointed by a single pin. The company was a chain of connected operations: blast furnaces that made pig iron, puddling furnaces that refined it into wrought iron, rolling mills that shaped it, tube works that welded it into pipe, nail factories, a foundry and forge that cast and hammered it into machinery, and coal lands two hundred miles west that fed the whole thing.

So this history reads as two stories at once. One is a corporate succession — Keim, Whitaker & Co. becomes Seyfert, McManus & Co. becomes Reading Iron Works becomes Reading Iron Company, and finally a subsidiary of the Reading railroad and coal empire. The other is a geography of production that starts at the foot of South Seventh Street and spreads north along the river, up to Ninth and Exeter, and out to Emaus, Danville, Pottstown, Birdsboro, and Columbia.

Where the canal met the rails

Before the 1830s, iron in Reading meant a blacksmith shop. What changed everything was transportation. The Schuylkill Canal had made the town a shipping point between the anthracite region and Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was under construction. A plant that could take in coal, ore, and limestone by water or rail, and ship finished iron out by either, had an advantage no country furnace could match.

That year Benneville Keim, George M. Keim, James Whitaker, and Simon Seyfert — trading as Keim, Whitaker & Co. — put up the Reading Iron and Nail Works at the foot of South Seventh Street, at the extreme southern edge of town between the Schuylkill and the P&R tracks. The site was chosen precisely so that both the canal and the railroad could carry its freight. This ground became the nucleus of everything that followed; in later years it would be called the Main Works, the South Seventh Street Works, the Tube Works, and, in part, the South Street Rolling Mill.

This was no small forge. The original rolling mill was a heavy frame building about 130 by 166 feet holding seven reverberatory furnaces — four for puddling, three for heating. Its divisions rolled bar, round, square, and flat iron, nail plate, band iron, sheet iron, and boiler iron. Next door stood a two-story brick nail factory, 75 by 90 feet, with about thirty nail-cutting machines on its main floor — cutting everything from 2d nails to 7-inch spikes — and drums, belts, and a grindstone in the basement, which doubled as a storehouse for several thousand kegs. Driving it all was a 180-horsepower stationary steam engine built in Pittsburgh by McClurg, Wade & Co. — remembered as the first large stationary engine in Berks County used to drive manufacturing machinery.

The cooper shop tells you the scale. Nails shipped in wooden kegs, so eight to ten men were employed doing nothing but making containers for the finished product. The works burned 80,000 to 90,000 bushels of bituminous coal and more than 2,000 tons of anthracite a year. Reading Iron's later fame would rest on pipe, but nails and merchant iron were the foundation.

Ernest Hexamer, Hexamer General Surveys, Vol. 10, plates 933–934, surveyed Sept. 1875. Map Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.

Forty years on, the fire-insurance surveyor Ernest Hexamer drew the same ground. By September 1875 the rolling mill and tube works employed 200 men — 250 when running full — and the surveyor noted what came out of each: merchant iron, nails, spikes, and skelp from the mill; gas pipe and boiler tubing from the tube works. The blast furnaces, a hundred yards off, had about 50 hands; the Steam Forge on North Eighth had 20 on the payroll of a full 50; the Scott Foundry had 175 of a full 250; and the Sheet Mill was “not operated at present.” Roughly 450 men at work, 600 at capacity — in the trough of the depression that followed the Panic of 1873.

New partners, the first pipe mill, and a date nobody agrees on

In 1846 the firm became Seyfert, McManus & Co. Simon Seyfert and his family stayed in; John McManus, a railroad contractor who had built part of the P&R, came in with other investors. Same works, new partnership — and, from April 7, 1862, a corporate charter behind it (see below).

Two years later came the most consequential addition in the company's history: the first pipe mill, in 1848. It bore no resemblance to modern seamless-tube production. Early butt-weld pipe was heated and drawn so its edges could be joined. Lap-weld pipe followed, with the edges of the skelp — the long strip of rolled iron that pipe is made from — scarfed by hand before welding. Charcoal-iron tubes came a few years after that. That modest department became the enormous Reading Tube Works, because pipe had markets that only grew: gas distribution, municipal water, steam plants, locomotives, oil fields, and eventually long-distance pipelines.

The rest of the chain filled in around it. Furnace No. 1 in 1853; the Scott Foundry and Steam Forge associated with the works in the early 1860s; a Sheet Mill in 1865; Furnace No. 2 in 1874. Furnaces made pig iron; puddling refined it; mills rolled it; tube mills welded it; nail machines cut it; the foundry and forge turned it into machinery. Vertical integration became the company's defining trait — and, much later, its heaviest burden.

1868: the iron works go to Harrisburg for water

The same proceedings tell you something the county histories skip entirely — what the works were short of in the 1860s. It wasn't ore or coal. It was clean water.

The crash

The old Reading Iron Works did not collapse because its factories had become worthless. The contemporary reporting paints a more complicated picture: heavy indebtedness, brutal competition, and not enough working capital to keep the furnaces going through a bad market.

The assignee's sale that summer gives us something the county histories never do: an inventory of what "Reading Iron Works" actually contained. The Tube Works held finished pipe, boiler tubes, oil-well tubing, casing, sockets, and fittings. The Rolling Mill had pig iron, puddle and scrap bars, bar and band iron, and ore. The blast furnaces held pig iron, fire brick, cars, and tools from a limestone quarry. The Sheet Mill, Steam Forge, and Scott Foundry each carried their own stocks of blooms, forgings, anthracite and charcoal pig, and scrap. It is almost a photograph of nineteenth-century integrated ironmaking.

Rebirth, and a whistle at the Scott Works

On August 12, 1889, the Reading Iron Company was formally organized. It bought the Tube Works, Reading Rolling Mill, Scott Foundry, Sheet Mill, and Forge from the assignee and immediately began rehabilitating and enlarging them. George F. Baer was the first president; F. C. Smink, treasurer and general manager of the old works, was the central figure in the reorganization; George Schuhmann handled the physical rebuilding and later served as vice-president and general manager.

Rather than retreat, the new company went shopping — and its first purchase was another failure.

Keystone: buying a bankrupt furnace for $100

The Keystone Furnace Company — locally associated with the Bushong name — stood in northwest Reading above the Schuylkill Canal, near the east end of the Lebanon Valley Railroad bridge, between the west ends of Green and Greenwich Streets. In August 1889 it made an assignment for the benefit of its creditors, blaming sharp competition in pig iron and an accumulation of debt. The property was two anthracite blast furnaces, machinery, fixtures, and about thirteen acres.

The expansion, dated by the newspapers

In 1895 Reading Iron bought the Montour Rolling Mills at Danville — a complex dating to 1845, and by local tradition the place where the first T rails in America were rolled — and the Crumwold Furnace at Emaus, the older spelling of Emmaus. It was also building an entirely new plant at home.

Oley Street: 1896 is the finish, not the start

The county histories say the Oley Street Mills were "built in 1896." The papers let us do better.

So: under construction by September 1895, operating during 1896, still called "new" at the end of that year. Also in 1896 the company added the former Philadelphia & Reading Rail Mill at Ninth and Exeter, which became the Ninth Street Rolling Mill and was remodeled in 1899 and again in 1902.

Then came a second rebuilding campaign: Montour rebuilt in 1901, a new forge on North Ninth Street in 1901–02 with electric cranes and fifty-ton capacity, a Danville puddle mill bought and repaired in 1905, and the Scott Foundry reconstructed in 1905–06. By 1909 the company reported two blast furnaces rated at about 180,000 gross tons, five rolling-mill plants at about 200,000 tons, and nine tube mills approaching 150,000 tons of tubular goods a year.

Six thousand men and nine million dollars in wages

At its height the Reading Iron Company was one of the largest employers in Berks County. Montgomery's 1898 account counts 3,000 to 4,000 hands. The 1908 Annals give about 5,000. Fox's 1925 account says more than 6,000 men and roughly $9 million a year in wages, eighty percent of it paid out in Reading. The trades ran from puddlers, rollers, and heaters to molders, machinists, pipe welders, furnace men, crane operators, carpenters, and laborers.

The work was dangerous in ways the capacity tables never show.

Around the furnaces and mills grew the neighborhoods that housed those men, and the institutions they built for themselves. The Oley Street Mill Relief Association, with its clubhouse on North Front Street and sick and funeral benefits paid from weekly dues, is the one we can document. There were surely others.

The railroad's iron company

George F. Baer ran Reading Iron from 1889 to 1901 and then left to run the Philadelphia & Reading Railway itself, and for a while the two stories were told as if that were merely a coincidence of personnel. It was more than that. By the early twentieth century the Reading Company held a major block of Reading Iron stock — and that holding got caught in the federal antitrust case that broke up the Reading railroad and coal empire.

In 1922 the United States Supreme Court noted that Reading Company held $1 million par value of Reading Iron Company stock, worth substantially more than par, and questioned whether a reorganized railroad could lawfully go on owning an iron manufacturer. The 1923 reorganization that followed moved the Reading Iron holding out of the railroad and into the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron corporate structure. That is what the Reading Times meant in 1937 when it wrote that control of Reading Iron had been "transferred in 1923" under the federal decree.

Leadership followed its own track. F. C. Smink succeeded Baer as president; in 1919 Smink became chairman and L. E. Thomas took the presidency. The 1924 officers were Thomas, J. M. Callen, James P. Roe, Henry N. Yost, and George W. Delany. By 1936 the president was P. N. Guthrie Jr.

Reported capacity, source by source

These are what the company and its chroniclers claimed the plants could make — capacities, not audited output — and they shift with the year and with what each writer decided to count. The 1936 column is different: those are actual reported results.

The coal acreage shrinking could be a sale, a bookkeeping change, or a typo. We don't know, so we show both.

Still a giant at one hundred

This is the single most important correction the newspapers force on the old story. Reading Iron did not vanish in the first years of the Depression. At the close of 1936 — a century after Keim, Whitaker & Co. lit the first furnace — company president P. N. Guthrie Jr. reported the year's results for the Reading plants.

Nearly fifty years after one financial collapse, and in the middle of another, the company was still employing 2,200 men and selling millions of dollars of iron. It had three months left.

How it actually ended: four years, plant by plant

The last pipe came off the mills at South Seventh Street in March 1937. Later that month the papers were still reporting the tube works as a going concern.

Behind that ordinary fire story the company was already winding down. Its parent, the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company, had filed for reorganization under Section 77B of the Bankruptcy Act on February 26 — a case built around more than $24 million in mortgage bonds. The tube works finished its last orders around June 1, 1937, and stopped. It had about 1,500 employees at the time. The Oley Street mills had run only occasionally that spring before closing for good; the Ninth Street rolling mill had been idle for years, with the charcoal plant operating at intervals. Only the nail plant at South Seventh kept regular hours.

Then came the disposition of assets, in three acts.

Act one: Scott Foundry finds a buyer (1938)

Act two: "Reading Iron Mills Doomed" (December 1938)

Act three: the drive to save it (January 1939)

The permits set off the last fight. Protests poured into the office of R. E. Taggert, president of the parent coal company, from unions, businessmen, and civic groups.

Nothing came of it.

Scrap (1939–1940)

The northwest tract went last. Site documentation records Keystone Furnace, the Roe Puddling Mills, and the Oley Street Mill as distinct Reading Iron operations and a 1941 sale of part of the property to Metropolitan Edison Company. One historic plant passed to a Berks County competitor and kept working; the rest became scrap, a utility site, and empty ground.

Twenty-five years earlier the company had employed more than 3,000 people. In the end, it took thirty pounds of dynamite and a scrap dealer.

Why it declined

The one-sentence version — they stuck with wrought iron, the world went to steel, the Depression finished them — is too easy. Reading Iron made steel boiler tubes, held a stake in Pennsylvania Steel, and kept a charcoal-iron line running for customers who wanted it. What it had, above all, was an enormous fixed plant spread across eight localities and rooted in a nineteenth-century process; a run of acquisitions in 1919 and 1920 made on the eve of the worst decade American industry ever saw; a corporate parent sinking under coal-company debt; and cyclical markets — railroads, oil, construction, municipal water — that all fell at once. The unions' own 1939 argument cuts both ways: if one competitor could absorb the whole wrought-iron tube trade, that trade had already shrunk to the size of one company. The integration that gave Reading Iron control over every stage of production also made it nearly impossible to shrink.