Henry Burden and the Iron Horseshoe Legend of Troy
Duncan Comrie
August 8, 2025
As a first-time visitor to the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway museum, one of my first impressions of Troy’s industrial history was the role of Henry Burden in shaping the identity of the city. The second was that his foundries left an enduring legacy of achievements. The challenge for a Scottish historian fascinated by the role of iron in the Industrial Revolution, and secretary of Falkirk Made Friends – a campaign group promoting the iron foundries’ role in public health – is to find ways of approaching Henry Burden’s history with context which helps explain his innovative mind: In Scotland his engineering background, his furnace experiments, his red hot visions, and his personal experiences of the problems of farming. In Troy, the seeds of his imagination were cultivated by his opportunity to test his practical engineering ability, which were harvested by his keen business sense.
My approach is horse-centered, the horse being the earliest form of iconic labor saver. To harness the Burden mustang, I had to corral the restless rodeo of Burden’s inventive mind and “rein in” on one achievement: the horseshoe machine. I hope expanding the social and cultural consequences of his horseshoe machines and comparing him to Henry Ford, another leading American inventor, encourages interest in how the leading engineers of the industrial revolution improved standards of transportation and communication for all.
But firstly, a summary consideration of Burden’s pre-horseshoe-machine experiences. Henry Burden (1791 - 1871) left Scotland and sailed to New York in 1819 at the mature age of twenty-eight. A farmer's son yet, apart from making some improved farming implements and studying engineering in Edinburgh, little is known of what he did in Scotland prior to emigrating. Given his achievements in Troy, New York, it is evident that he understood iron founding and power supply options both water and steam.
In Scotland and Britain, in Burdens youth, the leading industrial concern was Carron Company of Falkirk which when it was started in 1759, was the first planned large scale modern workshop of the Industrial Revolution. Carron Company put into practice the idea of large scale production using wrought iron and cast iron, in Britain, and thus made affordable to the public a wide range of domestic products including nails, shovels, frying pans, kettles, fireplaces and cooking ranges. It was the first foundry in Scotland which had integrated raw material supplies, the only one with its own shipping interests, and which used stored water for power; although no link is acknowledged these were likely to be examples which informed Henry Burden in Troy.
Why Burden may have left Scotland. The post- Napoleonic War period was a time of flux in Falkirk's iron industry, internal shareholder disputes in Carron Company, whilst externally it attempted to stop the rise of its first local competitor, Falkirk Iron Works circa 1818. These tensions may well have frustrated Burden’s iron engineering ambitions in Scotland. Falkirk, which later, post-1840, became the hub of domestic iron products where some 60 foundries would start, is 30 miles from Burden's home in Dunblane and the same east to Edinburgh and west to Glasgow. Only Carron Company had the range of iron activities to match Burden’s engineering ambitions. No doubt, then, Burden’s fertile imagination was fired up by hearing of the potential of the New World, and this encouraged him to try his enthusiasm for new engineering ideas in America. Indeed, after three years proving himself in Albany, he made the short journey to Troy where he grew deep roots, in fertile ground, to become a leading iron founder and a champion of wrought iron products and waterpower.
Due to his inventive genius Burden would, over a space of 18 years (1822 to 1840), rise from being an employee to full ownership of the Troy Iron & Nail Company, and change its name to Henry Burton & Sons. A rise enabled by the success, and profits, of his innovations in nail on horseshoe manufacture, particularly his rotary machine for processing puddled iron which improved the making of iron bars by concentric rolling and squeezing. Burden also harnessed water wheel and steam power, improved shipping access on the Hudson River and by creating two foundries, with integrated supply lines, he became a major supplier of pig iron in the Troy area.
Burden’s successes stimulated independent minded entrepreneurs who made Troy and Albany a center of the wrought, and cast, iron industry, notably the making of cast iron home heating, parlor stoves and cooking ranges, into decorative art forms. An era, circa 1830s to 1880s, when the stove makers lit a furnace of imaginative ideas which challenged the skill and craft of stove pattern makers and molders with fantastic designs.
As well as being an enterprising engineer and astute in business -- avoiding debt, incorporation and remaining independent – Burden’s imagination had visionary shipping ambitions: He carried out experiments in building innovative steamships, exploiting the potential of wrought iron and attempting to establish a transatlantic ferry. It is revealing that he wrote to the most innovative of British engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with advice on how to improve his steamships. Daring to advise Brunel suggests that Burden had confidence in his engineering knowledge and determination to compete with the best in the world. However, he tamed his imagination with more grounded visions to design labor saving machines for making useful everyday products such as nails, railroad spikes and horseshoes. Both ends of his engineering vision were informed by his practical experience as a farmer's son and a regular traveler between America and Britain.
Burden took a close interest in new engineering developments in Britain, which was at that time the “Workshop of the World” and a major investor in America. In the pre-1860s era British rail manufacturers had a monopoly on the American market which affected effectively excluded home production. Burden realized that there was a nail-sized gap in the market and filled it with his hook-headed railroad spike, thus securing his role in the galloping expansion of the railway iron horse. Burden was active in the period which was the beginning of a major increase in the development of the Industrial Revolution in North America.
Having set the scene for Henry Burton, it is now time to give free rein to the significance of his innovations in horseshoe manufacture. Burton was not the first to attempt designing such a machine, but he was the first to make it a success. Two prior designs had been submitted to the American Patent Office in 1809 and 1834, but these do not appear to have finished the course. The timing of the competing 1834 patent suggests Burden may well have been in a neck-and-neck race already got to the finish line first.
Burden’s farming roots made him all too aware of the problems making and fitting horseshoes. Each farmer was dependent on the original horsepower, and horses needed regular shoeing -- every six to eight weeks – to prevent them going lame. However making horseshoes for the 8.5 million horses in 1830s America was a specialized job which required the forging skills of a blacksmith and the shoeing skills of a Ferrier. Burden applied himself to the engineering problem from 1827, and by 1835 thought out his first version of a of a machine that could quickly and cheaply mass produce horseshoes to a variety of pattern sizes. Over the next 30 years burden refined the machine so that in one process it took in iron bar at one end and issued at the other end they horseshoe a minimum of one per second.
The consequences of this mass production technique are that farmers had more consistent quality of metal, and a reduced cost to keeping horses in good health, whilst for the blacksmith, the backbreaking labor was reduced, and their work rate increased. The horse-powered military is undoubtedly a big market, yet of social historical significance was the fact that here was a win-win for the farmer and the blacksmith, both in labor saving and improved working standards. The blacksmith could now devote more time to wider range of wrought iron fascinations , whilst the farmer could afford better shot horses. In the wider context of social improvement, the well-made horseshoe improved the health of the horses and their better use in many other aspects of society. From the cowboy herder riding the range to the public using horse drawn bus networks, from private use and family buggies and carriages to heavy road. haulage carts.
Henry Burden was a success in his lifetime. In effect he did cultivate a new legend for Troy: it was now an iron town pouring wrought and cast iron out for the benefit of society, by improving transportation and home heating. However, a more contextual approach does encourage a wider understanding of the contribution his horseshoe machines made to improving society. Another interpretation could make a comparison which provokes a reappraisal of his merits. Henry Burden shares a similar farming background to Henry Ford. Both were iron horse experts and developed mass production techniques and labor-saving machinery which made better, more affordable products which enabled a revolution in the freedom of movement.
There is a case to be made that Henry Burden’s vision, and achievements, catch Ford at the finish line of this view of history, because Henry Burden took a leading part in three transportation revolutions in America: the safer, healthier horse; securing the railway iron horse; and contributing ideas to the success of the ironclad steamship.
In conclusion, in a Scottish historian’s opinion, the horseshoe machine, this Burden legacy to Troy, the innovative and efficient shaping of wrought iron is a significant part of the history of the horse and its role in society. The surviving model of the horseshoe machine has the aura of a talisman; quite possibly a legendary symbol associated with Troy’s industrial success which made a sure-footed contribution to improving society.