Warwick Furnace
Warwick Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built 1737 by Anna Nutt and Co. Made first Franklin stoves, 1742. Supplied shot and cannon for American revolutionists. Furnace a mile and a half away on side road; iron mines a mile west on the highway.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Warwick Furnace was raised in 1737 by Anna Nutt and Company, a rare colonial ironworks led by a woman, in the wooded iron country of Chester County. Here in 1742 workers cast the first Franklin stoves, Benjamin Franklin's efficient new fireplace design, and in the following decades the furnace turned out shot and cannon for the American revolutionaries. The furnace and its ore mines lay scattered across the surrounding hills, feeding a young nation's fight for independence.
Why it matters
It shows Pennsylvania's colonial iron industry arming the Revolution—and a woman-run enterprise casting one of America's first branded consumer inventions.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1700s, the wooded hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania sat atop something valuable: iron ore, and the two things needed to smelt it — fast-running creeks to power the bellows and endless hardwood forests to burn into charcoal. Colonial Pennsylvania was becoming one of the iron centers of British America, and self-contained ironworks began to rise in this backcountry.
An operation like Warwick was less a factory than a small world unto itself. A charcoal-fired furnace ran day and night for months at a stretch, fed by woodcutters, colliers, miners, and founders who lived and worked around it. Historians often call these places "iron plantations" because so much life orbited a single stone stack breathing fire in the woods.
When Warwick was raised in 1737, the colonies were still firmly British, decades before independence was imagined. Yet the same furnaces that cast pots, tools, and stoves for colonial households would, within a generation, be turned toward a very different purpose.
People & events
Warwick Furnace is tied to two names, and the pairing is remarkable. The first is Anna Nutt, whose company built the furnace in 1737. In an age when business and property were overwhelmingly the domain of men, she stood at the head of an ironmaking enterprise — a rare thing then, and a detail worth pausing over now.
The second name belongs to Benjamin Franklin. In 1742 Franklin introduced his improved fireplace, an iron stove designed to throw more heat into a room and waste less up the chimney. Someone had to actually cast that clever design in iron, and by the marker's account the first of these "Franklin stoves" were made here at Warwick.
That single fact links a Chester County furnace to one of colonial America's most famous inventors — and to one of the first branded consumer products in American life. The furnace that warmed colonial parlors would later serve the fight for independence, supplying shot and cannon to the revolutionaries.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the American Revolution as a story of battlefields and statesmen. But armies march on iron, and independence had to be manufactured before it could be won. Places like Warwick are where that quieter, essential work happened — turning ore and charcoal into the cannon and shot a young nation needed to defend itself.
Warwick also captures how tangled ordinary life and revolution really were. The same industry that produced a household stove — comfort, convenience, everyday domestic life — could be redirected to the machinery of war. A furnace was a tool of peace or of conflict depending on what the moment demanded.
And woven through it is a woman at the helm of a colonial enterprise, and an inventor's name on a common object. Warwick Furnace is a reminder that the American story was built not only by soldiers and founders, but by the miners, founders, and ironmasters whose names history too often lets cool and fade.
If you visit
The marker stands in Warwick Township, but the historic works it describes are set apart from the road — the inscription itself points you toward the furnace about a mile and a half away down a side road, with the old iron mines roughly a mile west along the highway. Part of the pleasure here is that the story is scattered across the landscape, the way a working ironworks always was.
Stand for a moment and picture the scene: not a single building, but a whole community carved into the woods — the constant work of cutting timber, burning charcoal, hauling ore, and tending a furnace that could not be allowed to go cold. The quiet you find today is the opposite of what this place once was.
Warwick fits naturally into a road trip through Pennsylvania's iron country, where preserved colonial furnaces and "iron plantation" sites dot the creek valleys. Come with a full tank and an eye for the terrain, and let this roadside marker send you looking for the creeks, the ore beds, and the stone stack that once made history — and household warmth — out of Chester County's hills.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Anna Nutt
- · Benjamin Franklin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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