If you drive west out of Essex County and keep going until the hills start to roll a little harder, you will eventually land in Warren County, in a small crossroads town called Oxford. There, on Belvidere Avenue, sits a handsome stone house built for a Philadelphia doctor's family almost two hundred and seventy years ago. A hundred yards south of it stands the blackened stone shell of a furnace. Together, they tell a story that most New Jersey history classes skip right past: the story of how iron dug out of these hills helped keep George Washington's army supplied with cannonballs.

I've spent most of my life teaching people how to read closely — first as an English teacher, now as a real estate agent who still can't help pointing out interesting architecture. Shippen Manor and Oxford Furnace are the kind of place that rewards a close read. The manor isn't just an old house. The furnace isn't just a ruin. Read them together, and you get a compact lesson in how ordinary industry, not just battlefield heroics, helped win a war.

A Family Business Built on Iron

The story starts in 1741, when a Philadelphia investor named Jonathan Robeson began building a furnace in Oxford, drawn by iron ore deposits in the surrounding hills. It was only the third furnace built in colonial New Jersey, and the first in the colony where the ore was mined right on the property instead of hauled in from elsewhere. By 1743, the operation was turning out its first pig iron, and production climbed steadily from there.

Robeson partnered with Joseph Shippen Sr., another prominent Philadelphian, and after Robeson's death the Shippen family took fuller control of what came to be called the Furnace Tract. By the late 1750s, members of the Shippen family were the sole owners. Around 1754, Dr. William Shippen Sr. had a proper Georgian stone residence built on the property — Shippen Manor — so the family would have somewhere fitting to stay when they came to check on their investment.

More Than a Country House

It's tempting to picture Shippen Manor as a quiet country retreat, but that undersells what was actually happening there. The manor sat at the center of a working industrial operation. A large kitchen in the basement fed furnace workers, many of them indentured Scots-Irish laborers who lived in small log cabins scattered across the property. What began as a gentleman's investment eventually grew into something closer to a company town, with the manor functioning as its administrative and social hub.

Day to day management fell to Joseph William Shippen, who settled at Oxford in the early 1760s and ran the property for roughly thirty years. He shared the household with Martha Axford, daughter of an early local settler, who had been hired as housekeeper. The two never formally married, at least by any surviving record, but they raised seven children together at the manor — a detail local historians still puzzle over today.

When War Came to the Hills

When fighting broke out in 1776, the Oxford Furnace kept running, and that mattered more than it might sound. New Jersey's ironworks, scattered through the hills of Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties, became an important supply line for the Continental Army, which needed iron for cannons, cannonballs, and other military hardware. Oxford Furnace was one of several in the state that historians believe supplied that raw material. A historical marker near Cemetery Hill Road in Washington Township even notes that the Continental Army sent troops to protect the furnace, precisely because of the military goods it was producing.

That's a detail worth sitting with. This wasn't a fort or a famous battlefield. It was a working furnace in a rural corner of New Jersey, important enough to the war effort that soldiers were assigned to guard it.

One family connection tends to come up whenever people learn the Shippen name: Margaret "Peggy" Shippen, the great-niece of Dr. William Shippen Sr., married General Benedict Arnold and was later implicated in his infamous treason. It's a dramatic footnote, but historians who have researched the manor closely have found no evidence that Peggy or Benedict Arnold ever set foot at Oxford. The connection is real; the visit, as far as anyone can document, is not.

From Ironworks to County Museum

The furnace and manor outlasted the Revolution by a long stretch. Ownership passed through several hands over the following century — the Robeson family, a stove-manufacturing partnership called Henry Jordan & Co., and later the Scranton brothers, whose name should sound familiar to anyone who knows Pennsylvania's own iron and coal history. The furnace itself was rebuilt and continued operating in some form until about 1925.

In the twentieth century, the property changed hands again, eventually passing to the State of New Jersey and then, in 1984, to Warren County. Following an extensive restoration, Shippen Manor opened to the public as a museum in 1995, and it remains under the stewardship of the Warren County Division of Cultural & Heritage Affairs today. Both the manor and the furnace are listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places, and the furnace still stands at the corner of Washington Avenue and Cinder Street, the oldest surviving iron furnace in New Jersey.

Shippen Manor & Oxford Furnace, Side by Side

Frequently Asked Questions

The Short Version

Shippen Manor and Oxford Furnace aren't famous the way Trenton or Monmouth are famous. There was no pivotal battle on this ground. But the furnace kept turning out iron through the hardest years of the war, protected by Continental troops precisely because of what it produced, while the family that owned it quietly hedged its bets on which side would win. That combination — industry, ambivalence, and quiet usefulness to a cause — is a very human, very New Jersey kind of Revolutionary War story.

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