{"nrhp_refnum":"74001237","name":"Ironville Historic District","other_names":[],"category":"district","location":{"address":"Area surrounding Ironville including Furnace St. and Penfield Pond","address_restricted":false,"city":"Ironville","county":"Essex County","state":"NY","lat":43.921416972500054,"lon":-73.53492980021738,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1974-12-27","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Industry","Architecture","Invention"],"significance_levels":["state"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A historic district in the hamlet of Ironville, just west of Crown Point in the Adirondacks of Essex County, New York, centered on the Penfield Homestead (1828) and nineteenth-century dwellings along Furnace Road, with the sites of a former ironworks.","why_significant":"Ironville was a focal point of the Adirondack iron industry for over seventy years. As a by-product of that industry, it became the site of the first industrial use of electricity and indirectly contributed to the invention of the electric motor. The surviving wooden buildings also illustrate Federal, Greek Revival and Italianate influences.","narrative":"Ironville is a small Adirondack hamlet west of Crown Point in Essex County, New York. The district includes the Penfield Homestead of 1828, the cemetery and eleven other buildings along Furnace Road, plus part of Penfield Pond and the sites of demolished industrial structures. Almost nothing remains of the ironworks, which once had a dozen buildings, but the modest wooden dwellings, a Congregational Church of 1842, a parsonage, a boarding house of 1827 and a grange hall built as a store in the 1870s survive. The hamlet grew after Allen Penfield and Timothy Taft began making iron in the late 1820s, helped by the Champlain Canal, forests for charcoal and water power. Its ore was valued for purity, and a magnetic separator there led to an electromagnet that Thomas Davenport bought in 1833, which fed his work on the electric motor. The Penfield Homestead now serves as a museum.","period_of_significance":"19th Century","architect_builder":null,"architectural_style":"Federal and Greek Revival influences, with an Italian villa-style former store","criteria":[],"status_note":"The ironworks buildings are gone, leaving ruins, cellar holes and archeological sites. The dwellings, church, boarding house, grange hall and schoolhouse survive, and the Penfield Homestead is now a museum.","vacant_flag":null,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:50:38.59073-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_NY/74001237.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74001237/69ff36e609-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74001237/69ff36e609-1600.webp","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","author":"Magicpiano","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CrownPointNY_PenfieldHouseMuseum.jpg\" rel=\"noopener\">Magicpiano</a>, <a href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0\" rel=\"license noopener\">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CrownPointNY_PenfieldHouseMuseum.jpg"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75317783","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironville_Historic_District","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6073317"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/new-york/essex-county/ironville-historic-district-74001237/"}