First U.S. Coke Smelting

What the fact check changed. CORRECTED. The core claim holds and traces to an official state source, but the post overstated it in three separate ways and one of them is a superlative in capital letters. CONFIRMED: PA DCNR's own Trough Creek park history says, without hedging, 'During 1835, for the first time in the United States, good iron was produced using coke as a fuel at Mary Ann Furnace.' DCNR also confirms Savage leased the furnace in 1832, renamed it, and built Savage Forge. Africa 1883 independently records Mary Ann Furnace and Forge on Big Trough Creek, owned by John Savage, conducted by George Thompson. THE CLAIM IS CONTESTED AND THE POST SHOULD SHOW IT. Wikipedia's coke article says the first use of coke in an American iron furnace was around 1817 at Isaac Meason's Plumsock works in Fayette County. But a flat 'FIRST in the entire U.S.' in capitals invites a reader with a search engine to produce Meason in ten seconds. The rewrite attributes the claim to the state park's own history and keeps DCNR's qualifier 'good iron', which is the word that makes the claim defensible. DROPPED, 'John Savage's innovation': DCNR says Savage leased and renamed the furnace. No source opened credits him with the technique. Sole credit for an innovation is a claim of its own and this is the same trap that hit the Gregg post in batch 000. DROPPED, 'changed American metallurgy forever' and 'We were decades ahead of national iron technology': unsourced significance and unsourced scope. DROPPED, 'birthplace of American coke-iron smelting': stronger than what DCNR actually says, and directly exposed to the Meason objection.