The complex contains nine buildings, each built for a specific stage of iron foundry work. There is the machine shop, where finished castings were milled, drilled, and turned into usable parts. The mill store, where supplies came in. The supply room. The pipe shop, where cast iron pipe was finished and threaded. The carpenter's shop and pattern shop, where wooden patterns were carved as molds for the sand. The core room, where the sand cores that hollowed out cast iron pipes and vessels were made. The foundry building itself, where the molten iron was poured. The blacksmith's shop, where the smaller hand-forged work was done. And the ruins of a stable, which housed the horses that hauled the iron in and the finished work out, before trucks came along to replace them. Each building was sized and oriented for its specific function. None of them is large by modern industrial standards. Together they made everything from sewer pipe to architectural cast iron to mill machinery.

The machine shop is a working example of Federal architecture in industrial use. The Federal style, which dominated American building from roughly 1780 to 1830, was the architectural language of the early republic, all clean lines and brick coursing and proportions borrowed from the Romans. Most surviving Federal buildings in Virginia are houses or churches. A Federal-style machine shop is unusual. The walls are load-bearing brick. The windows are tall and regular. The interior originally would have housed line shafting driven by a steam engine, with belts running off the central shaft to power individual machines. The building survived being repurposed multiple times across the 19th and 20th centuries because it was so solidly built that nobody ever quite found a reason to tear it down.

The complex was designated a Virginia State Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, when it had been closed for only four years. The Petersburg Old Town Historic District, in which it sits, encompasses some of the earliest surviving commercial architecture in Virginia. The Iron Works contributes the industrial face of that district. Where the rest of Old Town shows the merchants, the public buildings, the warehouses of the cotton and tobacco trades, the Iron Works shows the muscle that made the rest possible: the smelting, the casting, the finishing, the parts that turned raw materials into usable goods. The site is unusually intact among American foundries of its era. Most have been demolished, or burned, or stripped for scrap during the World War metal drives. Petersburg's survived because the city, like the buildings themselves, ran into hard economic times and never quite mustered the capital to redevelop the block.

The men who poured iron at Appomattox Iron Works are mostly nameless in the historical record, but their work survives in pieces all over Virginia. Cast iron pipe was the foundation of municipal water systems in the era of typhoid and cholera. Cast iron columns held up storefronts in nineteenth-century downtowns. Cast iron grates covered storm drains and ventilation shafts. Iron founders worked in conditions that would horrify a modern industrial inspector: heat, fumes, the constant risk of molten metal contact, lung diseases that killed men slowly across decades. Some of the foundry's workers were Black, in a Petersburg whose Black community was both numerous and skilled; iron foundry work was one of the trades where racial restrictions were less rigid than elsewhere in the South. The work shaped them physically. It also paid better than field labor.

Visit the Iron Works today and you walk past a brick complex tucked into a riverbank corner of Old Town Petersburg, with the Appomattox River close by. The buildings have been stabilized but not dramatically restored. You can see where the smokestacks were, where the wagons unloaded, where the patterns were stored on shelves that survive in the carpenter's shop. The river that gave the works their name is the same river that the city gave its name from, and the works gave their name to in turn. Three uses, one word. The Appomattox runs east from here and joins the James, and the iron that was cast in this complex went out by river and rail to all the places in Virginia that needed iron. Most of it is still there, holding up streets or carrying water under sidewalks, doing the work it was poured for nearly a century ago.