The Great Western Furnace stands in the Tennessee end of Land Between the Lakes, the strip of land between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, in country that was once called Between the Rivers. Brien, Newell and Company built it in 1854, a four-sided stack of locally quarried limestone with a firebrick core about ten feet wide and forty feet high, to smelt the brown iron ore of Stewart County. It made iron for less than two years, from 1854 to 1856.
The National Register nomination says the furnace used numerous enslaved workers, and ties its closing to a slave insurrection scare of the mid-1850s, along with labor troubles and money problems. The workers settled near the furnace, which began the town of Model. The Union occupied the area after Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, fell on February 6, 1862, and in August 1864 a skirmish near the furnace left eight Union soldiers dead.
Land Between the Lakes was designated a national recreation area in 1963, under the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the plan required abandoning the communities of Model and Tharpe in Tennessee and Golden Pond in Kentucky. The furnace is about all that remains of Model. Congress moved the area to the Forest Service in 1998. The Tennessee end has the furnace, the road now called the Trace, which was once State Route 49, and the Fort Henry Trail system.
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