The first foray into new software is rarely comfortable and always an experience in how-to-do-it-better-next- time. The process of becoming familiar with Sketchup is interesting; the almost 200-page manual seems useful, but in fact, this is a highly interactive program and the best lessons are on-line tutorials. YouTube was a treasure trove of step-by-step explanations and demonstrations of the various tools. Stay tuned at the end for a list of things I wish I'd known then.
The geography of Tredegar Iron Works is a puzzle. There are several photographs from the nineteenth century, but they are from a distance. Sadly, explorations into Richmond's various records repositories haven't yielded any floor plans, and they are critical to understanding production, the flow of work, the assignment of workers in the facility over time, and the distribution process.
But as several historians have pointed out, the Tredegar site seemed to grown and shrink almost randomly. Flexibility was a corporate hallmark; and its size enabled responsiveness to market conditions; staying in business required it. In addition, war, fires, and a flood destroyed buildings that were subsequently reconstructed differently from the buildings they replaced. The original structure had been a flour mill.
The Sanborn map of 1887 is, therefore, a excellent find. Not only does it stabilize the placement of buildings and their processes at a specific time frame, it places relevant machinery and other technology in proper locations--particularly pieces of equipment such as furnaces considered fire hazards. The map at the left is a version composited in Photoshop to a manageable size. At this point the spike mill was the bread-and-butter of the factory while more diverse operations manufacturing larger pieces of equipment took place in the section of the factor outlined in the lower half. Only two of these buildings remain: the Pattern building and one of the foundries both used as a part of a Civil War history center.
I began building on the Sanborn map using monopoly style buildings, just to get practice with Sketchup. The fact is, though, without knowing the true dimensions of the buildings and without images of their exteriors, there's little value in building reconstruction along those lines. What the monopoly-style work indicates clearly, however, is how compact the site and tightly linked the facilities. The facility sat between the Kanawha Canal, later built over, and the James River. Water power kept the plants running; Tredegar never converted to steam, but constructed an elaborate system of water power distribution diverted to various buildings. As railroads developed--built in the South in large part with Tredegar manufactures--the proximity to water as a transportation mode for receiving raw materials and shipping finished products became less important. Water as energy remained vital.
I then tried to recreate the Pattern building based on current photographs. It's a wobbly construction; flaws and errors are not corrected because of the domino effect--as a beginner, one flaw leads to another; one correction opens a Pandora's box of flaws. Odd lines appeared from nowhere, surfaces suddenly became transparent, and elements sometimes just vanished. Things I wish I'd discovered earlier and things I know exist but haven't learned: layers; the capability of duplicating sides; why components only worked on the plane on which I'd tried to create them); how to create textures; the intersection of planes; and much, much more.
And just for fun, I tried creating a model by importing a photograph to use as texture. It kind of worked; but it just didn't look that good. I think the most valuable reconstruction of Tredegar--and perhaps many factories--would be a cutaway showing building interiors, machines and their functions with an animated walkthrough. Maybe next week.
The intersection of history and environmental geography is only one of many laudable qualities of Scott Reynolds Nelson's work, Steel Drivin' Man, John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend. In his narrative, geoforms have agency (to use a word that likely doesn't appear in Nelson's highly readable narrative), and to those who look closely, the history of our move to dominate natural surroundings is written on every landscape. 
