Blast furnace Huta Karol
From the blast furnace smelter in Vlachovo, a smelting building with a blast furnace in a similar architectural design to the blast furnace in Nižná Slaná has been preserved.
Karlova huta was in operation in 1870 – 1907. In the middle of the 19th century, there were two hammer mills and a blast furnace in Vlachovo, built by Count Karol Andrássy in 1843. According to statistical data from 1846, the blast furnace produced 1,008 tons of pig iron. In 1855, production increased to 2,240 tons of pig iron. In the blast furnace, ores from the mines in the immediate vicinity of the ironworks were smelted, partly also iron ores from Dobšiá. The hammers were shut down for almost the whole year, therefore even the production of bar iron was negligible. Almost all the pig iron produced reached the markets in an unprocessed state. Later, the ironworks became part of the ironworks of Count Emanuel Andrássy, who built a second blast furnace here in 1870 for the production of white pig iron. In 1870, there was one Comté-type fabricating workshop in operation. It was used for the production of bar and wire iron (2,800 - 3,360 tons per week). Bar iron was sold in Košice, wire iron in Wiener Neustadt.
In the eighties of the 19th century, there was only one blast furnace of pillar construction with a useful volume of 28 m3 and a height of 12 m in operation, the Karol smelter in Vlachovo. In 1884, 3,600 tons of white pig iron for bessemering were produced in the blast furnace. In 1898, the annual production reached 5,162 tons of pig iron. In 1900, the Vlach ironworks was taken over by the Rimava-Muráň-Salgótárján company, which definitively stopped production in 1907.
The furnace building has three floors with dimensions of approx.: length 25m, width: 10m and height 25m. The supporting structures consist in the lower part of massive stone masonry about 2m thick with vaults. The perimeter masonry of the upper floors is made of bricks. 0.50 cm. The furnace is a pillar structure with an open hearth, air heating was provided by a cast iron heater. The blower was driven by 2 water wheels.
The blast furnace in Vlachovo from 1870 documents the historical technology of pig iron production on charcoal, and it also attracts attention with its architectural design. The restoration and monument protection of the Karol blast furnace in Vlachovo are fully justified by metallurgical traditions in the Slovak Ore Mountains, especially in Gemer.
Similar technical monuments on a global scale are considered rare. For this reason, for global information, the University of Sheffield (England) published in the 1980s an overview of old blast furnaces all over the world, in which the Karlova Huta in Vlachovo (among the 7 blast furnaces in Czechoslovakia) is also listed.
The entire complex of buildings was preserved until 1993. The property was transferred to the municipality of Vlachovo. The object from a historical point of view, as a technical monument, is registered in almost all European catalogs. The sale of the property of the adjacent buildings (foundry, mold shop, mechanical workshop...) by the municipality to a private person with the intention of building a recreational facility can be considered an extremely drastic damage to the entire complex. After the property settlement, the buildings were renovated. Only the object of the blast furnace itself has been preserved. The smelter building itself (Karlova Huta) is managed by the Slovak Technical Museum. In order to preserve the monument, efforts were made to use it. The Slovak Technical Museum in Košice adopted the principles of preserving architecture, but its use was proposed in several variants. The most realistic seemed to be the option of a mountain hotel including a training center. The blast furnace building itself has three floors with the possibility of a main entrance on the third above-ground floor.
The peculiarity of the building is that a water channel from the Taich passes through the building, which was used to drive the wheels for the production of compressed air. The channel could also be used for a small hydroelectric power plant. The project itself was current until the rehabilitation of the other buildings.
The Karol Blast Furnace (Karlova Huta), located in the cadastral territory of the village of Vlachovo in the Dobšinská Píla location, is registered as a monument in the state register under the number Vs 2484.
The building is under renovation and is currently inaccessible.