Warwick Furnace/Farms

Built in the 1730s on land patented to the Nutt family, the Warwick Furnace complex in Chester County grew around an iron furnace completed in 1738 and a manor house of random fieldstone with corner quoins. Under Robert Grace the works produced Franklin stoves, and during the Revolution the furnace was designated an official arsenal, producing cannon in 1776. George Washington's army came to Warwick after the Battle of Brandywine in 1777. Through the nineteenth century the property was increasingly run as a farm, and its owners experimented with fertilizers and lime to restore soil fertility. The furnace ruins, tenant houses, springhouse, log cabin and stone barns still stand, showing how an eighteenth-century ironmaster's estate was organized. The property has stayed in one family line for about two centuries, which the nomination considers unusual and important for understanding the region's early industrial history in the French and Pickering Creek watersheds.