Saving Our History So It Has A Future
To read more about the Industrial History of Troy, follow these links:
Henry Burden and the Burden Iron Company (below)
Research Bibliography on the Industrial History of the Hudson-Mohawk Region (bottom of page)
Henry Burden and the Burden Iron Company
Henry Burden was born near the village of Dunblane in Scotland in 1791.
He showed early mechanical aptitude, so his family sent him off the Edinburgh to get formal education as an engineer. While studying there he met some Americans who convinced him that the future was brighter in the United States. They wrote him some letters of introduction, including one to prominent Hudson-Mohawk area land owner and investor Stephen van Rensselaer.
Burden crossed the Atlantic in 1819, arriving in Albany via Montreal. There, under van Rensselaer’s patronage, he promoted a new plow design (although some observers note that this plow bore a strong resemblance to a plow used in Scotland). That a better plow would be Burden’s first initiative is not surprising, given that it was in van Rensselaer’s interest that his tenant farmers be as productive as possible to pay their rents. Burden also developed a flax machine and a cultivator, possibly the first mechanical cultivator in the United States.
He was then hired by Isaiah Townsend of Albany to supervise the construction of a horse-powered ferry boat. Although steam-powered boats were already in use by that time (Robert Fulton had steamed from New York City to Albany in 1807), steam power was not practical for a ferry boat which spent much of its time idle and then made short trips. The ferry boat project was a success, and several were built and operated at different points along the Hudson and in Lake Champlain for decades.
Townsend was pleased with Burden’s work on the ferry. He was also an investor in the Troy Iron and Nail Factory on the Wynantskill in Troy, and he got Henry Burden hired as factory superintendent in 1822, only three years after his arrival in the United States. Burden’s contract was unusual. Not only did it make him the superintendent with a salary, but it also allowed him to continue inventing on company time and with company resources. If he developed anything with a commercial application, he could patent it and sign the patent over to the company. The royalties from these inventions initially went to the company, but over time Burden as inventor would receive a larger share, and Burden could use this income to buy shares in the company. By 1848 he owned the entire company.
His first invention for the Troy Iron and Nail Factory was an improved machine for making cut nails and carpentry spikes. He then modified the design of that machine to develop another machine for making hook-headed railroad spikes. While Burden did not invent the hook-headed railroad spike, he realized that this spike would become the standard method for attaching railroad rails to ties during the first boom in railroad construction, and that blacksmiths could not supply this demand. The challenge he overcame was to invent a machine for making a railroad spike with a strong joint between the head and shaft. This became a profitable business; Burden’s machines supplied all the spikes for the early Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Long Island Railroad projects, and subsequently many others.
Another important invention was the rotary concentric squeezer. This machine, patented in 1840, greatly improved the productivity of the process of turning wrought iron into final products.
But his most important invention was a machine for making horseshoes. His first patent for horseshoe making machinery, issued in 1835, required three separate machines. In 1843, he got his second horseshoe patent, which reduced the three machines down to two. In 1857, Burden, still not satisfied with his two-machine method for making horseshoes, came up with an entirely new design. This was his single rotary horseshoe making machine, which could take a heated length of wrought iron bar and turn it into a horseshoe at an average rate of one per second.
This invention made Henry Burden and his family very wealthy. Then the Civil War came along, and Burden became the main supplier of horseshoes for the Union army. This was a profitable business, but business increased so much that even the expanded water-powered works on the Wynantskill could not keep up (click here for information on the famous Burden water wheel). In 1861 and 1862 Burden build a large, new steam-powered mill on the Hudson River. Once the second plant was running Burden could produce almost 1 million horseshoes a week.
Burden’s mills were vertically-integrated operations. The Burdens owned iron ore mines in Columbia County, New York, the Adirondacks, and in Vermont, and converted it to pig iron in their own blast furnaces. The pig iron was then converted to wrought iron in their puddling furnaces, and finally the wrought iron was sent to their roll train to make standard shapes, or to their horseshoe, spike, or rivet lines. The products were sent out in wooden kegs made in their own cooperage. At its peak, the Burden works stretched one mile along the Hudson and employed nearly 2,000 men.
Henry Burden died at age 80 in 1871. His son James ended up in effective control of the family business, which was reincorporated and renamed the Burden Iron Company in the early 1880s (click here for information on the company office building constructed 1881-1882).
The company continued to offer a limited range of wrought iron products through the late 1920’s. However, business contracted due to the fall in demand for wrought iron from the introduction of mass-produced steel after the Civil War and the replacement of horses by motor vehicles. The water-powered works were shuttered by the end of the nineteenth century, and all production moved to the lower steam works. The company went into receivership in 1934 during the Great Depression, and the Burdens sold the plant to Republic Steel Corporation in 1940. Republic, which along with the Burdens also owned interests in high quality iron mines in the Adirondacks, was only interested in the Burden blast furnaces. Republic continued make cast iron in Troy until 1972 when the operation was shut down for air quality violations.