Qualla: Appomattox Iron Works

Appomattox Iron Works: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The oldest building in the complex sits at 28 Old Street in Petersburg, Virginia, three stories tall, four bays wide, brick laid in Flemish bond, walls thick enough to dampen the sound of metal striking metal that for more than a century rolled out of them onto the streets of the Old Town. It was built sometime between 1810 and 1825. The historians are not certain of the year. They are certain that, whoever the original builder was, he intended the structure to last. It has. The Appomattox Iron Works operated continuously at this location from 1899 until 1972, which means that the machine shop at 28 Old Street had already been a 75-year-old building when the foundry that gave the complex its modern name moved in.

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Appomattox Iron Works: Nine Buildings, One Trade

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 iro...

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Appomattox Iron Works: Federal Style on the Appomattox

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Appomattox Iron Works: Listed and Preserved

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 arch...

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Appomattox Iron Works: The Cast and the Caster

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 storefront...

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Appomattox Iron Works: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 unloa...

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