The Administration Building …

was an important part of the East Canaan operations of the Barnum Richardson Company.

Today, few people — even people who spend quite a while visiting the site — even notice what was once the administration building for the entire East Canaan works of the Barnum Richardson Company and is now the Barnum and Richardson Study Center.  From Lower Road, apart from the signage, it looks like a smallish private home (which, for a period of years, following the closing of the iron industry, it was).

And, from the furnace complex, it towers a bit forbiddingly above, some distance away.

What we know about the physical building:

We know that it’s actually two buildings.

When volunteers re-did the crumbling plaster in what had been the kitchen when the building was a residence, they discovered two separately framed structures, fitted adjacently to each other.  When they installed drywall in place of the plaster, they left a window so we could see the separate structures.

 

The regular saw marks in the beam on the left suggest that it was cut in a separate process from the one on the right, and that the two most likely were cut in different historical periods.

 

How the building was used in the Barnum and Richardson years:

For the workers in the furnace complex, the paymaster’s window was the most important feature of the building.

The administration building served, we know, the entire East Canaan complex of the Barnum Richardson Company, as well as subsidiaries and affiliates.  That means that three blast furnaces, with a fourth under construction but never used, a chemical company (the notion of distilling charcoal instead of creating it in the woods by controlled burning was in use here, creating an opportunity to sell the volatiles driven off in the distilling process), the slag company (we have a page to come all about slag), a sawmill, and who knows what we’ll learn of next…..

Clerk of the works

 

Ironmaster

 

Restoration of the building:

Vault

 

Office

Kitchen/office

 

Future of the building:

The sign outside the building calls it the Barnum and Richardson Study Center.  While we’re not near the stage when it can really become that, we do currently plan to make what was the waiting room in B&R days, then the living room when it was a private home, into a mini-museum.  One article in it for sure will be this bookcase, on permanent loan from the Canaan/Falls Village Historical Society.  It was previously in Barnum and Richardson corporate headquarters in Lime Rock.