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Place, Pride, and Public Relations:
The Lynchburg Foundry’s Unlikely History Magazine
FBY JAMES W. WRIGHT
For almost six decades of the twentieth
century the Lynchburg Foundry Company published a most unlikely magazine. Begun as a humble “house organ,” the Iron Worker evolved into
a richly produced, widely respected journal of local and state history. The transformation was driven by one woman with a passion for preserving the region’s heritage and with the family connections to make it happen: Lucille McWane Watson (1893–1988).
One “Big Family”
The history of the Iron Worker is thoroughly intertwined with the histories of the McWane family and the Lynchburg Foundry. Shortly after the Civil War, Charles P. McWane,
a millwright who had been taught the trade by his father, opened a shop in Wytheville to make plows and other farm implements. Charles taught his son Henry the trade, and
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when Henry was about twenty, the two men formed a part- nership called C. P. McWane & Co. Henry did the book- keeping and ran the office for the business, which had ten employees.
In 1887 Henry was recruited by the Glamorgan Com- pany in Lynchburg to be plant manager. Within two years he moved the operation into cast-iron pipe production and by 1892 was president of the company. In 1896 he helped his brother James establish a new plow factory, and in 1902 he left Glamorgan to become associated with the Lynchburg Plow Works. He reorganized the Plow Works as the Lynch- burg Plow and Foundry Co. and began making pipe. (This was in the days before contracts had noncompete clauses.) In 1905 the company bought the Radford Pipe and Foundry Company and became the Lynchburg Foundry Company. Henry hired his nineteen-year-old son, Lawrence, as book- keeper.
Henry died by his own hand in 1914, and the presidency of the growing company passed to Lawrence. Lawrence guided the Foundry through a phase of rapid growth spurred by the World War I demand for fittings used in the construc- tion of ammunition plants.
By 1919, the company had three plants (Lynchburg, Radford, and Anniston, Alabama), about 700 employees, and a total annual volume of business of about $2,750,000. The McWanes had always prided themselves on treating their employees as family, and Lawrence McWane wanted to pre- serve the company’s “Big Family” ethos. He reasoned that the