Customs House Museum’s ‘Sundays at 3:00’ series traces the history of the Clarksville Foundry

Clarksville, TN — The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center continues its free “Sundays at 3:00” lecture series on Sunday, September 6th, with “Forged in Fire: The History of the Clarksville Foundry,” presented by owner and family descendant Charlie Foust. The talk begins at 3:00pm in the museum’s Turner Auditorium.

Foust will trace the foundry’s long history, the products it has turned out over the years, and where the operation stands today — a story that reaches back well before the business took its current name.

The Clarksville Foundry traces its origins to 1847 and is one of the oldest continuously operating foundries in the United States. It has been owned and operated by members of the Foust family since 1912, a milestone the company marked as a century of family ownership in 2012. Four generations later, it remains a family business.

The work has changed with the times. In the 1850s, the foundry specialized in iron stoves and grates before diversifying into copper pipes, kettles, sheet iron and machine castings. During the Civil War, in 1861 and 1862, it produced cannon and munitions for the Confederacy until the Union occupation of Clarksville. A century later, it took over the well-known A.H. Patch line of corn shellers after that company ceased operations in the 1950s. Today the foundry specializes in custom, short-run iron castings, with work ranging from architectural reproductions to modern industrial components.

Leadership has passed down through the family. Charles Foust Jr., a 1978 mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Tennessee, became president in 1981 and set about modernizing the operation. In 1994, he was named Tennessee Small Business Person of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration for engineering a turnaround at a time when foundries across the country were closing. That threat had already tested the company once: when new EPA regulations in 1974 forced many foundries nationwide to shut down, Clarksville Foundry chose to upgrade rather than close, reopening after roughly five months and running continuously since.

Its castings turn up far beyond the city. The foundry cast new stair panels for Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium during its 1993 renovation, and its components can be found in the benches outside the Schermerhorn Symphony Center and the decorative rail caps on the Shelby Street pedestrian bridge. Its architectural work also appears at the Michigan state capitol, Tattnall Square Park in Macon, Georgia, and the Heceta Head lighthouse on the Oregon coast. For a National Geographic Channel program, the foundry reproduced the conning tower of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley.

Closer to home, the foundry’s work is stitched into Clarksville’s own landmarks. For the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011, the company cast a replica Model 1841 six-pounder field gun that was fired to open the local observances and now stands at Fort Defiance Civil War Park and Interpretive Center overlooking the Cumberland River. A second replica cannon, cast entirely in-house, was commissioned by the Clarksville Rotary Club for its 100th anniversary in 2017. The foundry also produced the eight-foot “Window to the World” sphere in Downtown Commons, assembled from 92 individual castings, and decorative stained-glass window frames for the First Presbyterian Church bell tower downtown.

It is that blend of local heritage and working craft that Foust will bring to Turner Auditorium.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Admission to the talk does not include entry to the museum’s galleries. Registration is available online through the museum’s event page.