Name/Title
Mount Tirzah Estate, or simply the Brevard House, burned down in 1968Description
The iron industry took root under Captain Alexander Brevard, father of Robert A. Brevard, whose entrepreneurial expansion of iron furnaces fundamentally shaped the region’s economy and landscape. Beginning in the 1790s, Alexander Brevard acquired land and constructed major furnaces, including Mount Tirzah and Rehoboth, while his brother-in-law, General Joseph Graham, built nearby Vesuvius Furnace, together forming an interconnected iron corridor in eastern Lincoln County . These furnaces produced pig iron, tools, and implements vital to the regional economy, and they required a skilled, coerced workforce of enslaved men trained as blacksmiths, founders, and laborers . The imposing Mount Tirzah estate, often later remembered simply as “the Brevard House”, stood as both an architectural symbol of planter-industrial wealth and a physical reminder that this prosperity rested on enslaved labor.