Pottsgrove Manor
Pottstown, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built in 1752 by John Potts (1710-1768), ironmaster & founder of Pottstown. The manor was located at the center of a 1,000 acre plantation that included the town, an iron forge, gristmills, and other businesses by 1762. The town was incorporated 1815 as the borough of Pottstown.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Ironmaster John Potts built this handsome Georgian manor in 1752 at the heart of a sprawling 1,000-acre plantation that, within a decade, encompassed an iron forge, gristmills, and other enterprises — along with the town he founded and named for himself. In colonial Pennsylvania, iron was a cornerstone industry, and men like Potts commanded whole working communities around their furnaces and forges. The borough of Pottstown, incorporated in 1815, grew directly from his holdings.
Why it matters
Pottsgrove Manor illuminates the colonial iron industry that helped power early America and the powerful ironmasters who shaped whole towns around their works.
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Related people
- · John Potts
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Iron Bridge
Pottstown, PA · est. 1953
In the 1840s American railroads were racing ahead of the engineering that carried them, and wooden bridges rotted and burned under ever-heavier trains. In the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad's Pottstown blacksmith shop, engineer Richard B. Osborne answered that problem with a truss built entirely of iron — completed in 1845 and reckoned the first of its kind in the country. It was a modest span with an outsized future, pointing the way from timber trestles to the iron and steel bridges that would knit the industrializing nation together.
Thomas Rutter
Douglass Township, PA · est. 1982
Thomas Rutter, an ironmaster who died in 1730, built Pennsylvania's first ironworks nearby in 1716 and went on to raise Pine Forge and this mansion in the decade that followed. Remarkable for his era, he was an outspoken opponent of slavery. Generations later, in the 19th century, the house served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers; an academy was founded on the grounds in 1945.
Colebrookdale Furnace
Colebrookdale Township, PA · est. 1967
Founded around 1720 on Iron Stone Creek by a partnership including Thomas Rutter and Thomas Potts, this ironworks is regarded as the first blast furnace erected in Pennsylvania. Named for a furnace in England, it drew on the region's rich ore and abundant timber for charcoal, casting the iron that a growing colony needed. It launched a Pennsylvania iron industry that would one day help make the state the forge of the nation.
Jeremiah Sweinhart and Successors
Boyertown, PA · est. 1994
The workshop Jeremiah Sweinhart opened in Boyertown in 1872 tells the story of American transportation in miniature. It began by turning out horse-drawn carriages, farm wagons, and winter sleighs for a nation still moving at the pace of the horse. After 1914 the same works pivoted to the motor age, building bus and truck bodies and even military vehicles, before production finally ceased in 1990 and the original shop became part of the Boyertown Museum of Historic Vehicles.