Determined not to be baulked in his enterprise, Darby abandoned the Bristol firm; and in the year 1709 he removed to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, with the intention of prosecuting the enterprise on his own account.

He took the lease of a little furnace which had existed at the place for more than a century, as the records exist of a "smethe" or "smeth-house" at Coalbrookdale in the time of the Tudors.

The woods of oak and hazel which at that time filled the beautiful dingles of the dale, and spread in almost a continuous forest to the base of the Wrekin, furnished abundant fuel for the smithery.
As the trade of the Coalbrookdale firm extended, these woods became cleared, until the same scarcity of fuel began to be experienced that had already desolated the forests of Sussex, and brought the manufacture of iron in that quarter to a stand-still.
It appears from the 'Blast Furnace Memorandum Book' of Abraham Darby, which we have examined, that the make of iron at the Coalbrookdale foundry, in 1713, varied from five to ten tons a week.

The principal articles cast were pots, kettles, and other "hollow ware," direct from the smelting-furnace; the rest of the metal was run into pigs.

In course of time we find that other castings were turned out: a few grates, smoothing-irons, door-frames, weights, baking-plates, cart-bushes, iron pestles and mortars, and occasionally a tailor's goose.