Martha Furnace and the diary with an uncertain author

From Potts to Evans

Isaac Potts built Martha Furnace in 1793 and named it for his wife, Martha Bolton. Hagley Museum and Library’s collection guide says Potts sold the works in 1800 to John Paul, Charles Shoemaker, Morris Robeson and George Ashbridge. In 1808 Samuel Richards and Joseph Ball acquired three of those interests, and Jesse Evans became manager. Evans bought the furnace in 1841. The New Jersey Historical Society dates the end of operations to 1844; Hagley says it closed soon after Evans’s purchase amid competition from Pennsylvania coal-fired furnaces. These repository accounts place the diary within a changing ownership structure, rather than the whole life of the furnace.

Two records in one volume

Hagley describes operating data on the left-hand leaves: workers’ time, materials consumed and finished output. The facing diary leaves describe events of the day. Its catalog identifies 360 individuals, among them workers, clerks, owners and people from the surrounding country who did business with the furnace. It also notes accidents, illness, celebrations, visits and connections to other ironworks at Atsion, Batsto, Federal Furnace, Hampton, Hanover and Weymouth. The volume can therefore support both a study of iron production and a study of the people who kept it going.

There is a conspicuous limit. Hagley says the volume does not record wages paid or other monetary totals; the companion accounts that held those figures have not survived. A worker’s time can be counted without showing what the worker earned. General histories of Pinelands ironworks list ore diggers, charcoal burners, woodcutters and teamsters alongside furnace workers, but assigning a particular person at Martha to one of those jobs requires the diary itself, not a regional description.

Who wrote it?

The diary was once attributed to Caleb Earl Jr. Hagley’s archivists now regard that attribution as unlikely. They see one main hand from 1808 through 1811 and apparently three writers thereafter. The New Jersey Historical Society calls the employee behind its typescript copy unknown. The name of a worker appearing in the volume would not, by itself, identify the writer.

The record also has a later history. Hagley says John W. Harris owned the original around 1917 and made a typescript copy now associated with Camden County Historical Society. The original passed through another private owner and a book dealer before its purchase by Hagley’s predecessor in 1962. An annotated edition of the diary portion appeared in 1976. These layers matter when comparing a quotation in print with the original handwriting. Hagley now links to digital material, but individual manuscript pages were not inspected for this update.

What the landscape still shows

The Pinelands Commission says Martha Pond preserves the name of the waterworks that supplied the furnace; the settlement around it has vanished. A Commission history reports that archaeological remains were examined and then covered again to deter vandalism. The map therefore marks the named Martha locality, not the exact position of every furnace structure or buried feature.