By 1811 Samuel Lucas, steel refiner, had set up a foundry exploiting his patent for malleable iron the ancient dyeworks site and by 1822 his brother Edward, had bought the works and continued family association with Dronfield lasting 160 years.
What was made in the Lucas foundry in the beginning is not precisely known, although one product is reputed to have been cannon balls during the Napoleonic Wars; certainly by 1828 firm was making spindles and fliers for the machinery of the fast expanding cotton, jute an linen trades in Lancashire, Dundee and Northern Ireland. Lucas's also made spades, shovels, files and railway wheels, steel spokes and plates of malleable iron at the whole pre 1870 mill dam site with its ancillary workshops and grinding shops.
There was another spindle and flier manufacturing concern at the Damstead Works of Ward, Camm and Siddall on Mill Lane and many smaller firms making sickles, reaping hooks, scythes and heavy edge tools.
Industrialisation in Dronfield reached its zenith its 1873 with the arrival of the Wilson Cammell steel rail making plant on Callywhite Lane and for ten years the town enjoyed boom conditions. The population rapidly increased, new areas of housing were built and many shops were opened.
The coal and the steel industries both suffered a decline in the 1880s and by 1883 the making plant had been removed to Workington Cumberland in an operation which astonished the commercial world.
The economic slump and the Wilson Cammell removal left Dronfield a stricken town with hundreds of empty houses and it was many years before there was a return to relative prosperity.
Some coal mining remained into the twentieth century and there were still some steel and tool making concerns, Lucas's foundry and spade shovel works amongst them.
The scars of the intense industrial activity of the nineteenth century healed slowly and now have mostly been obliterated although the town's core remains as an evocative reminder of a very different past.
