Horodishche plants

The plants were built on the basis of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich’s chartered diploma dated February 29 (March 10 in new style) of 1632 - by Dutch entrepreneurs Andreas and Abraham (Abraham) Vinius, and their associate Julius Willeken on the rented lands along the Tulitsa River in The Starogorodischensky camp of the Tula district (in Soviet times it was the Leninsky district of the Tula region , entered in 2014 in the city ​​of Tula ), 12 versts from Tula . The companions were instructed to "melt and pour iron on those places and pour iron on all sorts of articles and forge cannons and cores and boilers and boards and do different rods and do any iron work." ^[2] “Mills” meant hydraulic installations that were used to power the domain blowers and hammer hammers with water, for which ponds and dams stretched along the river.

From the end of the 1630s, the plants were operated under the leadership of the new composition of owners: Andrey Vinius , Peter Marcelis and Philemon Akema . ^[3] From December 1647, the factories were under the jurisdiction of the Velvet Yard ^[4] under the direction of Yu. Telepnev and B. Tushin. In September 1648, the plants returned to their previous owners, who later built the Kashirsky Plants ^[5] for the redistribution of pig iron smelted at the Gorodishchensky plants.

Horodysche plants together with Kashirsky factories became the basis of the Tula-Kashira metallurgical area in which iron was smelted and steel was produced from it. The first supply of iron to the state was carried out in 1636. ^[2] As of 1647, there were at least three factories, in 1662 there were four factories, but two of them did not work since 1655); in 1690 there were two left. Iron ore to the plants came from Dedilovskiy district (in 1708, together with the Tula province, it became part of the Moscow province ). The factories produced high-quality iron, iron and iron products, including cannons and their cores . In the early 1660s, a silver smelting plant was established on the basis of the Gorodishchensky plants, which became the first attempt to smelt silver in the Russian Empire: ^[6] four silver smelting furnaces were installed on it. Works at this factory supervised the Order of secret affairs , the production was served by soldiers.

Foreign specialists - German, French, Swedish, Polish worked as craftsmen at the Gorodishchensky factories; Russian workers and peasants were civil servants. The blacksmiths of the Tula armory settlement, who worked at the weapons factory, were also attracted. The ore was mined by service people - Cossacks, archers, gunners and others. The Tula-Kashira metallurgical district became a source of personnel and technological experience in the construction of the first blast-furnace plants in the Urals .

The exact time of stopping the plants is unknown, but at the beginning of the XVIII century they are mentioned in the documents as valid. The location of the first blast-furnace plants of the Russian Empire was established in the 1820s by Academician I. Kh. Hamel . In 1956, an expedition of the Institute of History of Natural Science and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR worked in their place, revealing remnants of 17th century industrial sites and defining their historical boundaries in archaeological means in the landscape of the village of Torkhov and the village of Slobodka on the Blue Tulitsa River. ^[6]

• Yurkin Igor Nikolaevich . Gorodyshchensky (Tula) plants: the Iron Age and the silver moment. Publisher: State Museum-Reserve "Kulikovo Field", Tula, 2007.

• GOVERNMENT PLANTS (Tula Plants)
• Horodysche plants in the first decade of their existence
• Dutch entrepreneurs in Russia 1550-1785