Robert Habersham Coleman


Robert Habersham Coleman was an iron processing and railroad industrialist and owner of extensive farmland in Pennsylvania.
He was the fourth- and last-generation scion of a family which controlled Cornwall Iron Furnace, in Cornwall, Pennsylvania. This major coal-burning ironmaking facility was founded in 1742 by Peter Grubb and produced pig iron, domestic products, and, during the American Revolution and Civil War, cannon barrels. Coleman shut the facility in 1883, opening new facilities for the company.
In 1881, at the time he took over his family's business, he was worth about seven million dollars. By 1889 he was estimated to be worth thirty million dollars. By 1893 the fortune had vanished. One of his homes, Cornwall Hall, was a "symbol of the rise, fame and decline of the 'king' of Cornwall during America's Gilded Age" and was demolished after 1914.
The Cornwall Furnace facilities, donated by his descendants, with their surviving stone furnace, steam-powered air-blast machinery, and related buildings, were once the nucleus of a huge industrial plantation, and are part of a designated National Historic Landmark District.
He commissioned architect J. Cleaveland Cady to erect the chapter house of St. Anthony Hall at Trinity College, which still stands in Hartford, Connecticut.

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