[4] Burden started at the Townsend & Corning Foundry, manufacturers of cast iron plows and other agricultural implements, located in Albany.

The factory was located on north side of the Wynantskill Creek in South Troy, about a half-mile northeast of today's Troy–Menands Bridge.

[2] Henry Burden realized that Troy's strategic location as a hub of rail and water transportation networks made it possible to produce and ship an enormous quantity of finished goods.

Burden originated a system of reservoirs along the Wynantskill Creek to hold the water in reserve and increase the water-supply to power the mills.

[7] Together the two sites contained sixty puddling furnaces, twenty heating furnaces, fourteen trains of rolls, three rotary squeezers, nine horseshoe machines, twelve rivet machines which each produced eighty rivets a minute, ten large and fifteen small steam engines, seventy boilers, and the great water-wheel.

The puddling furnaces employed hundreds of men, stripped to the waist, wearing hob-nailed shoes, and covered in coal dust.

[7] A network of railroad tracks moved trainloads of iron ore, and sand among the blast furnaces and steam mills.

A steam engine hoisted the filled bucket to the cable, along which it traveled to the point where the tilting apparatus overturned its contents upon the pile.

The firm owned 50 horses and a number of wagons to move the ore, coal, sand, clay, and manufactured goods from the different mills.

It also owned extensive iron mines with superior quality ore, and a number of limestone quarries to serve the furnaces.

Constructed 1881-2, the distinguished brick Romanesque Revival building contains examples of objects manufactured in the city throughout the 19th century.