Hereford Furnace
Hereford Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Established by Thomas Maybury in 1745 on the west bank of the Perkiomen Creek for the purpose of manufacturing iron. Maybury is credited with producing here in 1767 the first cast-iron cooking-stove in North America.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Thomas Maybury established this furnace on the Perkiomen Creek in 1745 to smelt the iron that colonial Pennsylvania increasingly demanded. Tradition credits the works with producing, in 1767, the first cast-iron cooking stove made in North America—an everyday innovation that would warm and feed countless homes. The site reflects the ingenuity of the colony's early ironmasters.
Why it matters
It links Pennsylvania's colonial iron trade to a homegrown invention, showing how frontier industry could seed practical American innovation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the mid-1700s, colonial Pennsylvania's iron industry was no longer a novelty — it was spreading across the countryside wherever ore, timber, and water came together. The colony had become a center of ironmaking in British North America, its furnaces and forges supplying a population that grew hungrier for iron goods every year.
The country along the Perkiomen Creek, in the hilly reaches of Berks County, offered just the right combination of resources. Settlers here could dig ore, burn the surrounding woods into charcoal, and harness the creek's flow to run an ironworks. It was a landscape practically made for a furnace.
Into this setting, in 1745, came a new ironmaking enterprise. The mid-eighteenth century was a confident, expanding moment for colonial industry, and an ambitious ironmaster had good reason to believe a well-placed furnace could thrive on the frontier of Penn's colony.
People & events
The furnace was established by Thomas Maybury, who set it on the west bank of the Perkiomen Creek for the straightforward purpose of manufacturing iron. Like other ironmasters of his day, Maybury would have overseen a demanding operation: the digging and hauling of ore, the burning of charcoal, the tending of fires that could not be allowed to die, and the casting of the molten iron that resulted.
What sets this works apart is a tradition that reaches beyond ordinary iron production. Maybury is credited with producing here, in 1767, the first cast-iron cooking stove made in North America. It's the kind of claim that belongs to the lore of early American industry — celebrated, and worth telling in exactly those terms.
Whether or not every such "first" can be pinned down with certainty, the story points to something real: colonial ironmasters didn't only cast raw bars and basic tools. They experimented with finished goods that could change daily life — and a stove that could warm a room and cook a family's food was about as practical an invention as frontier ingenuity could offer.
Its place in the American story
Pennsylvania's colonial iron trade was one of the foundations of American industry, and sites like this show it doing more than supplying raw metal. Here the local furnace becomes a seedbed of homegrown innovation — the place where an everyday American object is said to have first been cast.
The cast-iron cooking stove, in time, became a fixture of countless homes, transforming how ordinary people heated their houses and prepared their meals. To trace such an invention back to a colonial furnace on a Pennsylvania creek is to see how frontier industry and practical ingenuity fed one another.
That's the larger American thread running through this quiet spot: the idea that useful invention need not come only from great cities or learned workshops, but could emerge from the forge of a working ironmaster meeting the plain needs of the people around him.
If you visit
Seek out the setting along the Perkiomen Creek and let the water do the storytelling — it was the creek's power that made ironmaking possible here, so the stream is really the first exhibit.
This is rural Berks County, a landscape of woods and rolling ground rather than a grand industrial ruin, so come ready to imagine. Picture the heat and labor of a colonial furnace, and then picture something humbler and more surprising: the first cast-iron stove of a continent taking shape in this very place.
Fold it into a drive among the region's historic ironworks and you'll start to see how thickly this countryside is layered with early industry. For a traveler who delights in the origins of everyday things, there's a real thrill in standing where a humble kitchen stove may have first been born.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Thomas Maybury
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bob Rodale Cycling & Fitness Park
Upper Macungie Township, PA
Robert "Bob" Rodale (1930–1990) turned his family's Pennsylvania publishing house, Rodale Inc., into a national voice for organic gardening, preventive health, and physical fitness through magazines like Prevention and Organic Gardening. A committed advocate of cycling, active living, and what he championed as "regenerative" agriculture, he worked from the Lehigh Valley for decades until his death in 1990. Set in the countryside near his Emmaus base of operations, this park carries both his name and his belief that shared public spaces renew the bonds of a community.
Portland Cement
Upper Macungie Township, PA
In the rolling limestone country of the Lehigh Valley, a new American building material was born. In 1871 David O. Saylor began producing portland cement at Coplay, and by November 1889 the region pioneered the commercial use of the rotary kiln — a continuous-process furnace that turned cement-making from a slow batch craft into true industrial mass production. The valley's rich cement rock and rail links let the industry take root and dominate, supplying the mortar and concrete of a rapidly modernizing nation.
Portland Cement
Upper Macungie Township, PA · est. 1947
The American portland cement industry was born in the Lehigh Valley, where David O. Saylor first manufactured the material at Coplay in 1871. The region pressed the advantage further in November 1889 with the first commercial use of the rotary kiln, a process that transformed cement from a batch product into a continuous industrial output. Rich local limestone kept the valley at the forefront of the trade for generations.
The President Pumping Engine (1872-1900)
Upper Saucon, PA · est. 2024
In the industrial heyday of the Lehigh Valley, one of the largest single-cylinder steam engines of its age stood here, pumping torrents of water out of the Ueberroth zinc mine. Designed by the Lehigh Zinc Company's Cornish-born engineer John West and built in Philadelphia, the machine was nicknamed for President Ulysses S. Grant. From 1872 it ran for two decades, and its power and clever design drew engineers' attention from around the world.