The village of Fiskars developed around the ironworks founded by German-born Petter Thorwöste in 1649. The ironworks also produced copper. In 1822, John Jacob von Julin bought the ironworks and founded a fine production facility in 1830 and Finland's first workshop in 1836. The development of the industrial community was fast, and the factories and workshops produced utility items from scissors and puck knives to ploughs and power transmission devices. In order to transport the products, a narrow-gauge railroad from Fiskars to the Pohjankuru harbour was in use from 1891 to 1952. The history of the Fiskars company begins from the Fiskars Bruk, but the company no longer has active factories in the village.
During the seventeenth century a number of ironworks were founded in Finland. The large tracts of forestland in the Pohja region along with its unharnessed water power and good water routes made it an ideal centre for the Finnish iron industry. The ironworks at Antskog were founded around 1630, and Billnäs followed in 1641. Fiskars was started in 1649, and today is one of the oldest businesses in the western world.
When the ironworks were founded in Fiskars, Finland was under Swedish rule, and Sweden was one of Europe's biggest producers of iron in the seventeenth century. In 1649, Peter Thorwöste was granted the privilege of setting up a blast furnace and bar hammer in Fiskars and for the manufacture of cast iron and forged products. The iron ore used in Fiskars was mainly brought in from the Utö mine in Stockholm's outer archipelago and most of the bar iron manufactured at the ironworks was shipped to Sweden to be sold on the Iron Market in Stockholm's Old Town. In Fiskars, the iron was also used to make nails, thread, knives, hoes, iron wheels and other things.
In 1783, the ironworks was taken over by the Björkman family and production focused on processing copper ore from the nearby Orijärvi copper mine. By the nineteenth
