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The center of commerce for the operations, the Company
Store is literally at the crossroads of Long Pond Ironworks.
The road up past the Company Store
leads to the furnace bank. It is in this direction that all
raw materials for use in the furnace would pass on up to
warehouses and eventual use in making
iron. The other road off to
your right leads to the actual ironworks complex.
So this quiet area was once the center
of a bustling industrial community. There was an almost
continuous line of wagons coming through here bringing iron
ore from the mines, limestone from up in Sussex, charcoal
from out in the woods as well as other market goods used
here in the village. Wagons had to be weighed, a blacksmith
shop stood off the intersection towards,what today is, the
Monksville reservoir and wagon parts or harnesses were
repaired there, people would be shopping in the store, the
place was very busy.
The ruins, shown in the lower right image,
are the remains of the Company Store which may have been the original
store built here in the 1760's and then rebuilt in the 1860's. This is
where everyone in the village shopped and conducted business, all the
records were kept here and this became the first Post Office in Hewitt.
This was a company town, if you lived and worked here for the company,
you got to live in company houses, your children went to school in the
one-room school provided by the company and you did your shopping in the
company store on a credit basis which meant that you rarely saw much actual
cash, you "owed your soul to the company store." Directly across from
the store was the weigh station where all loads coming and going through
the village were weighed. The weigh station operated much like a modern
truck stop scale that you see on today's highways.
