Iron
    In addition to sporadic gold discoveries throughout the county and the occasional tannery, grist mill, buggy factory, and paper factory, Cleveland County produced a large amount of iron in the decades preceding the Civil War. Various sources show several forges operating here from the 1780s to 1860. On January 29, 1783, William Graham of Lincoln County, North Carolina and William Hall of Camden District, South Carolina agreed to establish an ironworks on the lower First Broad River one-fourth mile south of the mouth of Hickory Creek. They entered into this "copartnership for the making and manufacturing of Iron, Carrying on one Grist Mill and one Saw Mill and for other purposes. This particular furnace was known as the Washington Works. Another late-eighteenth century iron forge located in present day Cleveland 'County was John Sloan's Ironworks. 
Believed to have been located near the old Rutherford County border east of First Broad River, Sloan' s forge appears in an April 1787 Rutherford County road order with the instructions "to lay off a road the nearest and best way from Washington Furnace (Washington Works) to the road that leads from Rutherford to Sloan's old Iron Works. 
   Along with his gold mining interests and tobacco cultivation, Joshua Beam operated a forge along Buffalo Creek just east of New Prospect Church. Although production figures. for the other forges are not available, Beam's forge produced 60,000 pounds of hammered iron valued at $2,400 by 1850. Another forge operated in the Stice Shoals vicinity in the mid nineteenth century.