En route to the embattled national capital of Washington, D.C., soldiers from Wisconsin had stopped briefly in Pittsburgh, Pa. Describing his impressions of the city in a letter, one of the volunteers declared, “You can smell smoke, feel smoke & I will go so far as to say you can taste it.” The newsboys on the streets, he would note, appeared “as if they had [been] suspended over the funnel of some blacksmith’s shop.”
It was the autumn of 1861, and the smoke from Pittsburgh’s factories heralded the stirring of a giant. A monumental undertaking lay ahead for these manufacturers and for those in other Northern cities and towns. From Maine to Minnesota, the farms and factories would need to feed, clothe, and arm the Federal Army and Navy. Farmers and business owners would have to produce foodstuffs and goods at an unprecedented scale.
As the conflict lengthened, some private enterprises would make singular, even unmatched, contributions to the mounting struggle. One of those firms was an iron works edging a “kill,” or creek, southeast of Troy, N.Y. A mammoth 250-ton waterwheel supplied power to furnaces and machinery that cast a
