Quiet was probably not a word you could apply to the Allentown Iron Works in the late 1860s. Located in the city’s Sixth Ward, it consisted of what one local newspaper called “four immense stacks, four large cast houses, three coal-houses, storehouses, engine-houses, and other buildings necessary for carrying on the heavy business of the furnace.” The 600-man workforce was made up largely of local Pennsylvania Germans and Irish immigrants who worked in shifts.
The iron works’ major product was railroad rails for the booming market. On September 6, 1869, the press was reporting on the arrival of the first westbound train in San Francisco. Founded in 1846, the Allentown Iron Works were the first of their kind in the city.
But in the early morning hours of September 7, 1869, the factory was making another kind of news, and it was not good. At 1 a.m. an engineer with a lantern came into the waste room of furnace number 3.
What exactly he was doing there the press did not speculate on. But whatever it was, his lantern lit something in the room afire. “The fire then communicated to the engine-house and quickly spread in each of the engine-houses,” noted the Allentown Register, whose article was reprinted a day later in the New York Times, “involving in one sheet of flame the whole mass of the buildings and presented a sight fearful to look upon. The seething, hissing noise of the escaping steam and rushing of hot air, the white flame and sulfurous clouds of smoke formed a scene as appalling as it was grand.”…