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seven-year-old James sat on the knee of General Washington, who was on his way to Valley Forge.

    Workers at the Alan Wood Steel plant can be seen working during the company’s heyday in the 1920s. In 1920, Alan Wood Steel was producing more than 8 percent of the nation’s output of steel. The Alan Wood Company opened in Conshohocken in 1832 and closed in 1977.
    An agreement between James and Alan effective on January 1, 1832, resulted in the erection of a water mill for rolling iron at Conshohocken. Wood’s iron mill was located along the canal owned by the Schuylkill Navigation Company. The location included a ground rent of twenty-five cents per running foot yearly. The Schuylkill Navigation Company also contracted to supply “900 square inches of water at an annual rent of $1,000.”
    When production began on May 5, 1832, steel was processed to make shovel plates. Wood developed an early patent on steel shovel heads. In 1835, the Woods expanded their operation by building a three-story shovel factory at the west end of the mill.
    The company remained strong during the country’s Great Depression and worked in the war effort for the government during the 1940s. Following the war, a recapitalization plan was introduced in 1948 and was the company’s first step in modernizing in nearly three decades. This resulted in major improvements in 1953 and ’54, when multimillion-dollar improvements were made and new equipment was installed. By 1956, more than $56 million had been spent to upgrade the plant. In the early 1960s, the most sophisticated oxygen furnace was installed at a cost of $37 million. The company was forced to spend millions more in the early 1970s for improvements and pollution control programs.
    The money spent during the company’s final thirty years was a tremendous burden. The Wood company was unable to regain its hold on the steel industry as the large contracts were being purchased from overseas competitors at cheaper prices. Despite recording record sales of $98 million in 1969, the company filed for bankruptcy on June 10, 1977.
    After more than 145 years, the steel mill fell silent. More than 2,500 employees found themselves unemployed. The company was paying out more than $1 million annually to Conshohocken and Plymouth Township in taxes, so the closure of the plant crippled the borough of Conshohocken. In later years, Lukens’s Steel would occupy a small part of the Alan Wood Steel Company site, but it was never to be returned to the 5,000 employees who once gutted out a living making steel.
    An old Philadelphia Inquirer writer named Edgar Williams would sometimes remind his readers of the Alan Wood Steel Company with small anecdotes in his column like, “Just once more let people in the Conshohocken area see the ‘Connaughttown’ (pronounced Cunneytown) Moon, the glow that lit up the night sky whenever slag was dumped at night at the old Alan Wood Steel Company plant.”
J OHN E LWOOD L EE, WHAT A M AN
    John Elwood Lee was born in Conshohocken on November 15, 1860, to Bradford Adams Lee and Sarah A. Raysor. John’s father worked more than thirty-five years for the Schuylkill Iron Works and the J. Wood & Brothers rolling mill. Before John Elwood turned forty years old, he would be a multimillionaire, with his products known throughout the world, and one of the most respected businessmen in the country.
    Upon Lee’s graduation from Conshohocken High School in 1879, Charles Heber Clark landed him a job with William Snowden and Company. Snowden’s company manufactured surgical instruments in Philadelphia. On April 12, 1882, young Lee married Jennie W. Cleaver (together they would have four children), and a year later, he decided to leave the Snowden Company and strike out on his own.
    At the age of twenty-three, he decided to start his own business with a cash capital of $28.35. Lee was very savvy, and in the attic of his parents’ house