How Britain's Protectionist Trade Policies Created Valley Forge

When students of the Revolutionary War hear the words Valley Forge, they probably think of an iconic image: Gen. George Washington kneeling in the snow, surrounded by log cabins, praying for aid.

The Continental Army endured the winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, while the British hibernated in nearby Philadelphia. It was that winter, so the semimythologized story goes, that the Americans were sharpened from a ragtag militia that had done little more than strategically retreat during the war’s first two years into a force capable of challenging the redcoats.

But before Valley Forge became the “Valley Forge” of American military history, it had already played a smaller, unofficial role in the fight for independence.

This “forge” in its name was a small ironmaking operation established on the banks of the Valley Creek in 1742 as the Mount Joy Forge. It was just one of dozens of small ironworks that popped up across the hills of eastern Pennsylvania in the decades before the revolution. The densely wooded region provided ample fuel for furnaces that smelted iron ore into pig iron and other forms of workable metal, which could subsequently be forged into tools and household goods. The supply chains ran down the river to Philadelphia and from there to the rest of the colonies and the world.

In 1750, however, the British government tried to intervene in that burgeoning market. With the passage of the Iron Act, the American colonies were allowed to produce only unfinished iron and were allowed to export it only to Britain. Finished products would have to be reimported from Britain—with a high tax applied, naturally.

Existing forges, like the one where the Continental Army would later encamp, were allowed to continue operating but could not expand production without permission from the crown.

The law was not always obeyed, as a small exhibit in the stables at Valley Forge National Historical Park explains. In some cases, it may have been openly flaunted. John Potts, who bought the Mount Joy Forge in 1757, founded another forge in the area in 1752, seemingly in defiance of the Iron Act (though historians at the site are unsure of its exact legality).

In the long run, the Iron Act was an utter failure. The mercantilist law incentivized both American producers and colonial officials to ignore it and helped galvanize support for independence among Pennsylvania’s commercial classes.

The British army destroyed the Mount Joy Forge on its way to occupying Philadelphia in the fall of 1777. But neither brute military force nor protectionist trade policy could stamp out the market for Pennsylvania iron—without which there would never have been a Valley Forge to serve as the turning point for Washington’s army.

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