Lehigh Crane Iron Company

The Lehigh Crane Iron Company (later simply the Crane Iron Company) was a major ironmaking firm in the Lehigh Valley from its founding in 1839 until its sale in 1899. It was founded under the patronage of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, which hoped to promote the then-novel technique of smelting iron ore with anthracite coal. The new company was named for George Crane, a British ironmaster whose superintendent, David Thomas, was hired to come to America and set up an ironworks using the new technique.

The company put its first furnace into blast in 1840, and quickly gained a reputation for efficiency and ironmaking prowess among the many furnaces that now sprang up in the Lehigh Valley. Over the next several decades, Crane Iron developed an extensive portfolio of assets, buying mines in the Lehigh Valley and in northern New Jersey, and taking over many of the smaller iron furnaces in the region. Crane Iron also financed the building of railroads in the area to haul limestone and iron ore to its furnaces.

As the merchant pig iron business began to decline, Crane Iron sold off much of its railroad interests in 1896. In an effort to revive Eastern iron mining in the face of competition from Minnesota, Crane took part in Thomas Edison's attempts to develop a magnetic ore beneficiation process. However, Edison's experiments proved uneconomical and the Edison Ore-Milling Company was a failure. In 1899, Crane Iron was sold to the Empire Steel and Iron Company, a conglomerate of Eastern and Southern iron furnaces. The Crane Works, as the company's plant was now known, last made iron in 1930, and the plant was torn down in 1932.