Knight Foundry, Sutter Creek, California

Visitors to Knight Foundry are given a guided one hour tour along the paths that iron products follow to completion. We track the raw materials from the scrap yard and coke pile to the cupola fumace. Allour iron has been recycled - if you have an engineblock in your car that was cast in California, itprobably has iron in it that originated in used horseshoes from New York City that came around CapeHorn as ballast in clipper ships.

We track the four thousand year old craft of making cast iron. Start in the pattem shop where the wooden patterns used in molding iron are made from mahogany and sugar pine. Everything in hereis a bit larger than life. Iron shrinks when it cools;the rulers in here are slightly larger than your regular ones - shrink rules.

Then on to the foundry room where tons of iron are melted in America's oldest working iron furnace and poured into green sand'molds. Be sure to come back to Knight Foundry on a Saturday to watch us pouring molten iron. Before we turn on the blast weyell WATCH YOUR FACE! because a big old ballof fire comes out up there where they're shovelingcoke - don't want to singe their beards.

So much strange and ancient foundry language to learn: Sprue and Risa, Draught, Gagger, the Breastof the Furn"e, Elephant Snot, Cope and Drag, CorePrint and Core Box, Yankee and Rammer.

The 1872 machine shop is a vision of mechanical genius. Overhead, a maze of wheels, shafts and belts spins, whirrs and flaps. Massive and ancient machine tools - lathes, shapers, giant drills and planers - do their work just as they did more than a hundred years ago. Mine hoists, rock crushers and stamp mills were loaded onto oxcarts out on Eureka Street to be hauled off to the Kennedy, the Argonaut, the Lincoln and the other gold mines.

The blacksmithy rings to the sound of the hammer and anvil as the smith turns out wrought iron. A Smith Smites, Wreaking Wrought iron, the words tie together. The ironmonger museum shop and visitor center is a place to learn more about working with iron, historic industries and skilled work of all kinds and a place to buy beautiful and useful cast iron made by Knight Foundry and the best available guides to making things of all sorts.

Return to our Sutter Creek Tour or click on miner to end the tour

Information, photographs courtesy of the Amador County Archives, The Historical Marker Database, and the Chronicling America Database