Guided tour of Forges de Baignes
The forge was first mentioned at the beginning of the 16th century, but the Thirty Years' War put a stop to this development.
The forge became important in the 18th century. The Forge Master’s House dates from the very beginning of the century. Most of the buildings date from the great reconstruction program of the end of this century. The forge master, Claude-François Rochet, then employed the bisontin architect Jean-Antoine Guyet, son of Jean-Pierre Guyet, an entrepreneur who worked for the buffalo architects Antoine Colombot and Alexandre Bertrand (himself Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s architect of operations for the construction of the Besançon theatre). It organizes a hemicycle around the blast furnace, framed by two buildings in the shape of a quarter of a circle. Between these two buildings leaves the «new street» bordered by working-class housing.
The forge, however, quickly encountered difficulties and ceased to function around 1820. The blast furnace was modernized by the installation of a steam engine but closed in 1869, and was destroyed. The forge was converted into a second-stage foundry until 1961, when metallurgy activities ceased to exist.