Royal Blake's Blast Furnace

For the folks on West Hill, Forest Dale to the west was closer than Rochester to the east. Forest Dale was less than eight miles from John & Stephen Laird's house, the last house in Old Philadelphia before Brandon Gap. Forest Dale was one mile past the road to Goshen.

Charcoal was produced on West Hill for over a half century, and taken across Brandon Gap by teamsters with horse and ox teams, where it was melted down to pig iron at Blake’s, also known as the Forestdale Iron Foundry.

Royal Blake ran the Forest Dale Iron Works from about 1835 thru 1852, when he died. Here, Conant found the kind of iron for his stoves that was most heat resistant, and least likely to crack.

Chester Smith owned about 800 acres of land that extended from West Hill to the basin of Mount Horrid, and sent his teamsters over Brandon Gap on a regular basis, with charcoal (called "coal") that he had made in his pits to the bellows-charged, blast furnace.

Numerous buildings, including a company store, boarding houses, a school, and other buildings have vanished.

The chimney of the blast furnace, last fired in 1865, still stands, despite a construction company blasting the archway with dynamite for construction materials. The owner put a stop to that sort of further destruction, and gave it to the state.

Forest Dale is a hamlet that is the west most part of Brandon, on the "road to Rochester." Several famous inventors lived in Forest Dale, including inventor Thomas Davenport, child prodigy banjo player Francis Bacon, and builder of Bacon & Day Banjo Co., once the "Cadillac of banjos" in the early 1900s.

Before becoming known as a banjo maker the world over, Bacon had a shop in Forest Dale, Rutland County, Vermont, where he built banjos under the name of Bacon Banjo Company.