David Thomas
Catasauqua, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
"Father of the American anthracite iron industry" lived here. A native of Wales, he built Crane Iron Works, deemed the world's first anthracite iron furnace to be completely successful, both commercially & from an engineering standpoint.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
David Thomas carried a hard-won secret across the Atlantic from Wales: how to smelt iron using abundant, slow-burning anthracite coal rather than scarce charcoal. Settling in the Lehigh Valley, he built the Crane Iron Works, widely credited as the first anthracite iron furnace to succeed both technically and as a business. His breakthrough transformed eastern Pennsylvania's hard-coal region into an industrial powerhouse and earned him the title "father of the American anthracite iron industry."
Why it matters
Thomas's furnace helped ignite America's iron and steel age, showing how immigrant expertise and native coal could combine to fuel the nation's industrial rise.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Crane Iron Works
Catasauqua, PA · est. 1997
On the Fourth of July, 1840, Welsh ironmaster David Thomas fired up a furnace in Catasauqua that finally proved anthracite coal could smelt iron on a commercial scale. Earlier attempts had failed, but Thomas's hot-blast furnace for the Lehigh Crane Iron Company soon turned out 50 to 60 tons of pig iron a week, and the works grew to six furnaces before closing in 1930. The success helped shift American iron production away from charcoal and toward the hard coal of Pennsylvania's mountains.
Davies and Thomas Company
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Founded in the iron-rich Lehigh Valley in 1865, the Davies and Thomas Company mastered a demanding new craft: casting the heavy iron plates that line tunnels bored beneath rivers and cities. Its segments went into landmark works of American infrastructure—the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and railroad bores—as well as projects overseas. A sample of its tunnel lining was proudly displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
First Cement
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At Coplay in 1871, David O. Saylor produced the first portland cement made in the United States, freeing American builders from reliance on imported European product. Less than two decades later, in November 1889, the same locale saw the first commercial use of the rotary kiln — a breakthrough that let cement be manufactured continuously and at scale. These innovations turned the Lehigh Valley into the heart of the young nation's cement industry.
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