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The Whitney Armory was built on both sides of the Mill River. On the east side, below the bluffs of East Rock, the buildings included a forge and storage sheds for the forge’s fuel.
The Forge
Eli Whitney Sr. designed the Armory’s forge in 1804. It was the first and largest of the buildings on the east side of the river, and one of the most important buildings of the whole armory operation.
A forge is a building where metal is heated then shaped and joined. In the Armory forge, blacksmiths would have created gun barrels and other metal components from steel, a strong combination of iron and carbon. These metal components were then carried across the footbridge to the Armory workshops to be refined and assembled.
The inside of the Forge would have been dark, lit only by the forge fires, and extremely hot. The darkness allowed the blacksmiths to judge the heat of the steel, which would turn red, then orange, then yellow, and finally white in the fire. The hotter the metal, the easier to shape and join.
[IMAGE: PLAN]
Whitney planned for 6 hearths and two water channels for the forge. The building was adapted and reused over the years, so we cannot be sure how many hearths were originally built. We do know only one channel was built. [LINK TO WATER INFO]. Water was an essential component of the forge activities: it could be used to cool the metal and also may have powered forge machinery.
The aging forge building was destroyed in the 1950s, but visitors to the EWMW can still make out the level area where it stood.
[IMAGES: Munson detail, historic photographs]
The Coal Shed
The forge needed a huge amount of fuel for its fires. The Armory used charcoal, which it stored in four sheds set into the East Rock hillside, all built with stone quarried at the site. The stone helped protect against fire. One shed, built in 1804, survives. It is the oldest of the Armory’s working buildings still standing.
Charcoal burns much hotter than wood, which made it much better for metalwork. However, there was a problem: charcoal is made from wood that is burned down at high heats with little oxygen. Charcoal production was difficult and required huge amounts of wood. Connecticut had been all but deforested by the 1790s. Some wood had of course gone to building and to household fuel, but huge amounts had gone towards charcoal production to fuel the state’s growing industries. Eli Whitney sourced his iron from furnaces in northwestern Connecticut, but had also had to compete with those furnaces, other gunmakers, smiths. and brickmakers for the limited supply of charcoal. Ultimately Whitney looked beyond Connecticut and found a charcoal supplier in Pennsylvania.
After arriving in New Haven Harbor by ship, the charcoal would have been transferred to small flat-bottomed boats called scows and brought up the Mill River to the Armory site. Workers would have then carried the charcoal up the hill and loaded it into the storage buildings from above, dropping it through a door in the gable.
The surviving coal shed, with further additions, continued to be used for industrial purposes even after it was no longer used to store fuel. When Heaney Industries [LINK] closed in 1979, the building held machinery that processed kaolin, a type of clay often used for industrial purposes.
[IMAGE: historic image of shed??]