A Wrought Iron Mystery! Historian discovers the truth about George Washington legend

A historical mystery of wrought iron drew researcher Ann Howell to Wilmington – and led her to rewrite a bit of the Port City’s architectural history.!

The whole quest, however, began with a lawn jockey.

Howell, a Philadelphia-based sociologist and independent scholar, had been hired some years ago by a patriotic group commemorating George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Its members wanted to get to the bottom of a legend that lawn jockeys – those little metal statues once used as hitching posts and, later, as 20th-century lawn ornaments – honored the memory of a little boy who froze to death on Christmas night, 1776, while holding the reins of Gen. Washington’s horse.

It didn’t take Howell long to prove the legend had no basis in fact. (Neither did another legend – that jockey statues, with faces painted black, originally marked sympathetic households on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves.)

Her research, however, uncovered something else: A Philadelphia foundry, operated by industrialist Robert Wood (1813-1887), shipped ornamental ironwork across the United States, including to Wilmington. Using shipping and customs records, Howell proved that Wood supplied much of the city’s ornamental iron.

Howell presented her findings in a talk last week at the New Hanover County Public Library, co-sponsored by the Historic Wilmington Foundation.

Her work is significant, said local historian Janet Seapker, because nobody knew where much of Wilmington’s ornamental iron had originated.“She used records that no one here had tapped before,” Seapker said.

Some people had suspected Hart & Bailey had cast the iron, said local history librarian Beverly Tetterton, but proof was lacking. Now, it appears that Hart & Bailey, the predecessor of the Wilmingtonn Ironworks, imported Wood’s iron parts and assembled them locally, Tetterton said.

During trips to Wilmington last year, Howell also found plenty of local landmarks whose fences, gates, railings and verandas (technically, the metal framings of a porch) matched copyrighted patterns in Wood’s catalogs. A few of these structures bear the label “R. Wood maker, Philadelphia.”

Among the notable houses with Wood’s ironwork are the Bellamy Mansion, the MacRae-Dixon house, the Latimer House and the Savage House.

John C. Bailey, a partner in Hart & Bailey, seems to have put a Robert Wood fence and gate around his house at 219 S. Third St. So did the other partner, L.A. Hart. (Hart’s house was demolished, but the fencing survives around a parking lot beside First Presbyterian Church on Third Street.)

Wood’s foundry also supplied iron fencing for some burial plots at Oakdale Cemetery, as well as the circular metal air vents still seen in the ceiling above the seats at Thalian Hall’s main stage.

His foundry’s work can still be found in dozens of federal buildings across the country, at the New York Stock Exchange, on the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville and as far south as New Orleans, where he supplied the city’s distinctive cornstalk-patterned fencing.

Howell said the extent of Wood’s business showed how tightly the regions of the United States were tied together in the mid-1800s, despite the political disputes between North and South. She plans to publish her findings.

Text courtesy of: www.wilmingtonstar.com