Forging Ruin

In 1818, six-year-old Richard Jones watches liquid iron pour from the tap hole at Hanover Furnace in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and does not flinch. His father Benjamin, a Quaker ironmaster managing forty-four thousand acres of timber and bog ore, sees in the boy the ambition that will either continue the family's enterprise or destroy it.

Forging Ruin follows Richard from that first encounter with molten iron through seven decades of building, losing, and building again. He inherits an iro...