Tag: stone

Rhode Island’s Newport Tower

Here’s the Newport Tower in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island. The remains of a windmill built of stone in the 1600s, it’s sometimes claimed to have been built by Vikings (it wasn’t) or other alleged early visitors to North America. It was originally part of the property of Rhode Island Governor Benedict Arnold (great-grandfather of the other, more infamous, Benedict Arnold), who arrived in Newport in 1651 and died in 1678. The tower is described in Arnold’s will as “my stone built Wind Mill” and by 1741, it was already referred to as the “old stone mill.”

The mortared stone of the Newport Tower.
Statue of William Ellery Channing, Unitarian theologian, in front of the Newport Tower.
The Newport Tower is 28 feet tall.
The Chesterton Stone Windmill, built 1632, in Warwickshire, England. Photo is from the 1930s. Source: ourwarwickshire.org

Blast Furnaces at Scranton, Pennsylvania

The stone blast furnaces in a park just outside of downtown Scranton are an imposing reminder of this Pennsylvania city’s early industrial history.  George and Selden Scranton had owned an iron furnace in northern New Jersey before moving to Pennsylvania. In 1840, they and their partners built an iron furnace in Slocum Hollow on the Roaring Brook. Their enterprise, later renamed the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company,  grew to become one of the largest producers of iron in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the company moved its operations to New York. The mills and other buildings were demolished, leaving only the four blast furnaces behind.

Scranton Iron Furnaces

Scranton Iron Furnaces

Scranton Iron Furnaces