The Iron and the Flame (The Line of the Black Water)

Benjamin Jones is twenty years old and watching Philadelphia the way his father taught him to watch iron — by weight, by quality, by the soundness of the structure. It is the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention is in session behind closed doors on Chestnut Street, and Benjamin has been sent from Chester County with a letter of introduction and sixty pounds to learn the iron trade in the largest city in the new republic.What he learns, in a Philadelphia countinghouse by candlelight, will shape the next sixty years of his life: that the men who made the iron cleared four times what the men who traded it ever would. He will not be a middleman. He will be the man at the furnace mouth.The path to that furnace runs through a plague, a marriage, and a house on Chestnut Street where the granddaughter of Samuel Howell asks the right question about charcoal. It runs through the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where the Rancocas Creek runs black over the bog ore and where, in the summer of 1808, Benjamin stands at the top of a charging bridge with his hand on warm stone and understands that he has arrived. It runs through the cannon-casting of 1812, the forge named for his wife, the land acquired piece by careful piece across forty-four thousand acres of pine forest — and then, in a single spring, through the panic of 1819 and a trusteeship that strips him of everything he has built.The Iron and the Flame is the second novel in The Line of the Black Water, a historical fiction series by Thomas Worrell following one Welsh Quaker ironmaking family across three centuries of American history. Drawing on more than twenty years of archival research into one of the first families of the New Jersey iron industry, the series traces the Jones line from the stone farmhouses of Glamorganshire to the furnaces of the Pine Barrens — and the dark water that carries everything forward. Read more