 The company's main and original plant was in Hokendauqua, Pennsylvania, which grew up around it; it also came to own blast furnaces and railroads elsewhere in the Lehigh Valley and mines in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.Changes in the iron industry in the early Twentieth Century left Thomas Iron struggling to compete, and after a failed attempt at modernization and revival from 1913 to 1916, the company's assets were sold and largely dismantled during the 1920s.David Thomas, a Welsh ironmaster, had been brought to America in 1839 to introduce the hot blast manufacture of anthracite iron by the Lehigh Crane Iron Company.