So far, none of the New England sites are new to me, and as soon as I got here, I remembered visiting as a kid. The visitor center is in an original building, while the blast furnace, casting shed, forge and blacksmith’s shop were reconstructed on their foundations. There was some work being done to get the park completely reopened this summer, but the museum and most buildings were open. It’s an impressive site, and you can see an egret in the river to the right.

As at Blackstone in Pawtucket Rhode Island, the site is on a water fall, and the local tribe (now dispersed) was known as the Pawtucket, meaning Falls. To the left above, you can see the spillway where the diverted water turned the giant mill wheels, powered the bellows for the forge and worked the heavy trip hammer to make iron bars, and while the river isn’t as deep here, the marshes were filled with iron ore. While Blackstone had America’s first cotton mills in 1790, the English settlers here in 1640 built the first iron mill. The Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony owed much of its success (and all of its nails) to this mill. When the iron workers moved on for new opportunities, they built similar iron works where they settled.