Selective Demolition Helps Restore Historic Pennsylvania Ironworks
March 25, 2025
This article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of DEMOLITION magazine.
It isn’t often enough that you get to work in a building so steeped in American history that you get to see up close things the size of which one never imagined existed, like a 20-foot-high gantry crane made of wood, one of the only two in existence.
The Phoenix Iron Company is a rate slice of U.S. history that began on the banks of French Creek in 1783. The site is as unusual as it is unfamiliar to all but a handful of people.
Among the facility’s many significant achievements, workers here forged the cannons that helped Yankee soldiers win the Civil War and milled column steel for the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
While most of the hangar-sized industrial buildings have been razed, the foundry building, dating to 1882 and housing huge core furnaces and the massive wooden crane, has been historically designated and is being renovated as part of an ambitious project to redevelop the old foundry grounds and revitalize the town of Phoenixville, which borders Valley Forge National Park.
The task for Selective Demolition was to remove two brick and steel shed-roof additions from opposite corners of the foundry building and two large kilns attached at one end. The massive steel doors separating the kilns from the rest of the building had to remain intact, as well as the steel structure forming a freestanding roof over the kilns.
Working under the direction of state and local historical officials who decided what should be demolished and what should be left intact, Selective Demolition was under watchful eyes much of the time as they emptied contents of kilns and rooms that had been left untouched since the foundry closed in the 1970s. They did uncover some great items.
Salvaging other industrial features attached to kiln walls complicated the removal process as Selective carefully picked apart 24-inch-thick brick walls to salvage a massive steel wall bracket system on which hot steel was placed to cool slowly. The I beams that supported the corners and kiln roofs were extraordinarily heavy cast iron that never warped under the intense heat of the kilns.
Barely visible railroad tracks still lead from the trestle bridge across historic French Creek directly through each kiln and into the main building. According to a former foundry worker, donkeys were used to move the railroad cars in and out of the building. He also mentioned how he’d sit up at night in his company-owned row home adjacent to the grounds, mesmerized by the red glow of the towering smoke stacks as the mammoth core furnaces reached 1000 degrees and cooked right through until dawn.
At each location of building removal, Selective first saw cut masonry 10 inches deep from each side with a hydraulic ring saw and cut steel with propane torches. After removing the unstable roofs by hand, Selective used a backhoe for the major removals and finished by removing stubborn grout and brick with electric chipping guns.
While the future use of this magnificent building has changed a couple of times over the past year since Selective’s work was originally bid, one thing is for sure: The breathtaking features of one of America’s great foundries will remain intact and become architectural elements to forever remind us of our humble beginnings and to astound all who gaze upon them.
