RonnieAdventures: RonnieAdventure #0066 - Old Irontown, Iron County, Utah

Old Irontown and the accompanying iron works are now just ghosts of a time past, but the site is still worth a visit. At its peak there was a schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, general store, butcher shop, post office, boarding house, charcoal furnaces, and a foundry. Today, the walls of an early rock house, a charcoal kiln, and foundry foundation are about all that remain on the site.

When Utah Territory was being settled, shipping iron products from eastern United States was very expensive; so a local sources of iron ore was needed. Mining was attempted at several locations in southern Utah, but the mines were not profitable.

Then, in 1868 the newly formed Union Iron Works started mining at Pinto Creek and produced an average of 5-to-7 tons of pig iron per day. Charcoal was the preferred fuel, so two charcoal kilns were built that converted wood to charcoal by smoldering the wood in a controlled environment. One of the beehive shaped charcoal kilns was destroyed, but the other kiln is still standing on the site.

In the foundry the iron ore was mixed with limestone that served as a catalyst ( flux) to remove the impurities. The heavier iron sank to the bottom and the impurities bound to the limestone and rose to the top as "slag." There are still "slag" piles located along the walking trails around the site.

The limestone was mined locally and pulverized using a Spanish style arrastra. An arrastra contains hard rocks in the bottom of a circular pit that are attached to a horizontal arm so that the rocks can be pulled around the perimeter of the pit by a mule to "grind" the limestone. There is still an arrastra on the site that reportedly contains the original stones used in the grinding process.

In the molding house the pig iron was further refined in a smaller puddle furnace and then the iron was hammered and worked into usable items, or cast into other needed objects. The chimney from the puddle furnace is still standing.

After a few years Old Irontown could not compete with the larger mining companies, and it was not profitable selling small items to the early settlers, so the facilities were abandoned in 1876.

In 1923 Union Pacific agreed to constructed a spur line to from the Cedar City Area to Provo, Utah, where Columbia Steel Corporation had a blast furnace. For years more than 500 tons per day of iron ore that had been quarried from large open pit mines just to the north of Old Irontown were shipped to northern Utah for processing. Then, in 1960 foreign competition, and domestic tax issues, resulted in a substantial reduction of iron ore quarried from the large open pit mines in the area. And, by the mid-1980s, all mining operations in the area stopped. Although there is currently no mining activity in the area, this area still holds one of the nation's richest iron ore deposits.

As an added bonus, on the road to Old Irontown, we saw numerous wild turkeys along the road. They didn't look quite like the nice, plump turkeys that we have at Thanksgiving; but it was still exciting to see wild turkeys.

Although not part of the Old Irontown history, Rubber Rabbitbrush (Chrystothamnus nauseosa) is abundant in the area. The early settlers used the plant for chewing gum, tea, cough syrup, and a yellow dye. During World War II the US Government did extensive research on the plant to see if it could be used as a substitute for commercial rubber. As far as I know, no financially feasible commercial uses for the plant have ever been discovered.