CHAPTER TWO

IRON IN AMERICA

1645 TO 1870

The steel industry of the United States grew out of the iron plants of our colonial past. Iron making commenced in the colonies as early as 1645 at the Saugus Works in Massachusetts. This effort was never financially successful and closed in 1676. The site has been completely restored as part of America's industrial heritage. A more successful metal operation was the Raynham Forge Plant near Taunton Mass. that opened in 1656 and operated until 1880. Other furnaces were built at Braintree, Mass. in 1648 and at New Haven, Connecticut in 1658. Thomas Rutter built a bloomery forge in Berks Co. Pennsylvania in 1716 and the first blast furnace, the Colebrookdale Furnace in 1720. Anthony Morris built the famous Durham Iron Works near Easton Pa. on the Delaware River. Peter Grubb discovered the iron ore deposit where he located the famous Cornwall Mine in 1736. This open pit mine became the largest source of iron ore in America until the opening of the great ore deposits of Michigan and Minnesota over a century later. He built the Cornwall Furnace and the town of Cornwall for housing his Welsh workers.

THE 1645 RESTORED IRON PLANT AT SAUGUS, MA.(Wikipedia)

THE 1736 PETER GRUBB RESTORED IRON PLANT AT CORNWALL, PA.(Wikipedia)

Between these very early iron plants and the time of the Revolutionary War, iron making spread to many of the colonies of the northeast. Wherever bog iron ore or other iron-bearing minerals were found in conjunction with plentiful supplies of wood for charcoal, iron could be made, provided either a local population or water transportation to a ready market was also present. Iron making spread to New Jersey by 1710, with other operations later at Oxford Furnace (1742-1882), and at the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey where the Martha Furnace was a 20,000 acre plantation, one of the largest ever operated. The Peter Hasenclever Works was one of largest investments in an iron works prior to the war, approximately $250,000.

The Principio plant in Maryland was another large operation. Begun in 1751 it had four blast furnaces and two forges and had timber covering 30,000 acres. It was destroyed by the British Army in 1777. It was rebuilt for the war of 1812, but the British destroyed it a second time. The Whitaker brothers acquired it in 1836 and restored it again. The Principio Company was absorbed into Wheeling Steel Company in 1920.

In 1778 a massive, wrought-iron chain was installed across the Hudson River at a narrow bend at West Point. Its purpose was to prevent the British from literally cutting the colonies in two by maintaining a fleet on the Hudson all the way up to Albany. The engineering was done by a young immigrant from England, Thomas Machin. The metal was made and forged into links at a nearby iron plantation known as the Sterling Iron Works. This iron operation, working with a local magnetite ore, was established in the early 1750s by a father and son team, William and Abel Noble. Later the Nobles acquired a partner in William Hawxhurst and enlarged the business to include a tilt hammer capable of working large wrought-iron billets. Before the Revolutionary War, the entire iron works was inherited by Peter Townsend, the son-in-law of Hawxhurst

LINKS OF THE CHAIN ACROSS THE HUDSON 1778(Wikipedia)

The chain was made of 750 links. These individual links were hammered out, flattened at the ends, bent around a mandrel and hammer-welded at the joint. The chain was made up of sections containing nine links each. The sections were floated on rafts and were attached into a continuous chain during installation with clevis joints and pins. The completed chain was anchored at both sides of the river and the rafts carrying the sections remained in place to support the weight. The British never tested the installation with its accompanying shore batteries. The Hudson above West Point was strictly a colonial waterway and the flow of men and supplies from New England to Virginia was assured.

Pennsylvania became the major iron-producing region by the time of the Revolutionary War. The availability of ore, wood for charcoal, limestone for flux and water represented by the major waterways of the Susquehanna, the Schuylkill and the Lehigh-Delaware Rivers and their tributaries, kept this region productive until, as happened earlier in England, the wood for charcoal became scarce. The Durham Iron Works in Bucks County was a major source for cast-iron cannon, and the Cornwall Furnace, with its associated mine, was the most productive in this country.

As Dr. John Bray points out in his well-known textbook on Ferrous Production Metallurgy (1942), "The story of the great 'iron plantations' which flourished in Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century is one of the least known but most interesting chapters of colonial history". These plantations (up to 10,000 acres) usually contained a large mansion house for the owner that was surrounded by the houses for 60 to 80 workers and their families. The greatest activity was cutting wood and making charcoal because the blast furnace consumed daily the harvest from an acre of land.

The iron ore was mined from the local hillside, and delivered to the blast furnace by wagon or even in pouches on horseback. The output of the furnace as pig iron or of the forge as wrought iron had to be delivered to the outside world in the same manner. The yearly production of these iron plantations was a few hundred tons to as much as 1000 tons for the largest of them. In this fashion the ironmakers of colonial America turned out approximately 30,000 tons of iron in 1775.

The production of iron in the new United States of America increased from 30,000 tons at the start of the revolution to 54,000 tons from 153 furnaces by the census of 1810. This slow growth was largely because of a general lack of industrialization in America. Our per capita consumption of iron hardly changed in this 35 year span. Another factor was imported iron from England. It was cheaper to make iron from coke in Britain and transport it by water to the major port cities of the East Coast than to continue using charcoal in the inland plantations of America and get the product to the newly growing areas of population.

The conflict with England that we call the War of 1812 increased the demand for iron but did little to change the nature of making it. This country continued to use charcoal as the fuel for reducing iron ore in the blast furnace. It was not a matter of backward technology but of availability. The massive deposits of bituminous coal lay in the Pittsburgh area across the mountains from the iron furnaces in Southeastern Pa. around Phil. Even the anthracite coal discovered in northeastern Pa. could not reach the iron furnaces. It is difficult for us today to visualize the extreme handicap imposed on our country in this period just before the advent of bulk land transportation.

The beginnings of a solution to this problem came about because the city of Philadelphia was desperately seeking a way to prevent the farm products and the small amount of manufactured goods from the area north and west of the city using the Susquehanna River to ship from Baltimore. Philadelphia was the largest port in this new country and its politicians were battling to maintain this position against New York City and nearby Baltimore. After 1825 and the opening of the Erie Canal, New York was clearly in a position to dominate the trade coming from the upper midwest. This left Philadelphia with the problem of finding a practical route through the several mountain groups making up what we call the Alleganies to Pittsburgh where trade could funnel through the Ohio River into the center of the nation. The first priority though was to capture the local trade leaking out to Baltimore and to provide a means of bringing the production of the newly-developing anthracite coal mines from the region in the northeastern corner of the state to the metropolitan areas along the coast. The only solution to bulk transportation at this point in history was by water. While there were many natural streams in this corner of Pennsylvania they all contained numerous obstacles to navigation. This meant building canals.

Canals were not new to America. They had been dug in New England with some limited success. With the daring attempt to build one across upstate New York all the way to Lake Erie, a job just coming to completion in the mid-1820s, many attempts were now undertaken to build them throughout the country, especially in the northeast.

The first and one of the most profitable canals built in America was the Delaware and Hudson Canal. It was built by private capitol (many of America's early canals were built by private companies, state governments helped by sometimes giving these companies the right to the revenue from lotteries). It was master-minded by three brothers by the name of Wurt. They had tied their future to that of the anthracite coal-fields behind Moosic Mountain in the Scranton Pa. area. They had two major problems. The first was to find a way to get the coal out of the wilderness of northeast Pa. and down to the cities on the coast, especially New York. The second was to convince people of the time that anthracite coal (known as stone coal) was an acceptable fuel. The Wurt brothers felt that if they could get the coal to New York at a reasonable cost, it's value would soon sell itself. In this they also had an ally in the mayor of New York, Phillip Hone.

The technical expertise for the project was to come from Benjamin Wright, who was chief engineer on the Erie Canal. The logical route for the canal, recognized even by the Wurts, was across the Delaware River into the state of New York, northeast up the valleys west of the Shawangunk Mountains, then down Rondout Creek to Kingston, New York and the Hudson River. It was a natural waterway even though it meant the canal went northeast when New York City was southeast. This meant the longest mileage on the haul was on the Hudson River.

Work was started in the summer of 1825, just when it was finishing on the Erie Canal at the five locks at Lockport. This released Wright and several of his assistants on the Erie for work on the Delaware and Hudson. The 60-mile section within New York was completed in a little over a year, but the more challenging stretch up the Delaware and inland to a little village called Honesdale was to require an additional year and a half. While the canal was officially opened in the fall of 1828 and some coal was immediately shipped to New York City, major projects still remained. These were the aqueduct across the Delaware River to link the two sections of the canal, and the incline to bring the coal over the 1000 foot Moosic Mountain to Honesdale. The aqueduct would be built some 20 years in the future by none other than John Roebling. It was one of his first spans using wire cable in a suspension system. The second major project still to be accomplished was a system of inclines to carry the coal from the mines over Moosic Mountain down to the terminus of the canal. For part of this route, a railroad was constructed and a young engineer by the name of Horatio Allen was sent to England to buy several locomotives. One of these, the Stourbridge Lion, was actually used in a trial run and has the honor of being the first steam locomotive operated in the United States. However, at eight tons in weight it was obvious on this first and only run that it was too heavy for the light rails and bridges built for it. It was never used again and many years later the canal company donated it to the Smithsonian Institution. The incline plane system for lifting the coal over the mountain was accomplished in a few years, and with the building of Roebling's aqueduct over the Delaware River in the late 1840s, the Delaware and Hudson Canal was finally completed. It was one of the very prosperous transportation systems of the 19th century. Its major customer would always be anthracite coal, and it hauled as much as 3,000,000 tons in the peak year of its existence. It was finally abandoned in 1899, but the company name would continue as a railroad even into the 1980s.

Other canals were built on the Susquehanna, the Schuylkill, the Lehigh and the Delaware Rivers. The Union Canal system linked the Susquehanna and the Schuylkill with the coal fields above Reading. The big project finally linking the Susquehanna with the far distant Pittsburgh was the Main Line Canal. This was the most ambitious canal project in America, built at a cost of over 10 million dollars. It started at the Susquehanna and went up the Juniata River to Hollidaysburg at the foot of the Alleghenies. A series of inclined planes and rail lines carried it over the 37-mile mountain range down to Johnstown. From here it followed the Conemaugh River to the Allegheny River and then to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River. Philadelphia finally had a transportation system into the heart of the Midwest.

With the sudden availability of anthracite coal in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the ironmasters soon learned to adapt it to their blast furnaces. The hard coal did not have to be processed to coke. It was used as it came from the mine. Just as coke had revived the British iron industry a century before, anthracite coal was to accomplish the same result for the iron industry in Southeast Pennsylvania. The industry had been in long-time decline because it too was running out of wood. This strategy of improved water transportation with the fortuitous application of anthracite coal in iron making worked sufficiently well to allow this region to become the first big iron producer in America. The passage of a half-century and a Civil War would occur before the name of Pittsburgh would replace that of Philadelphia as our biggest metal producer. And during this time Philadelphia would be producing the mill machinery and developing the factories for manufacturing products made of iron and steel. Thus it was a major incubator for our American Industrial Revolution.

One name to come down to us from this period of iron making is that of John Fritz. Fritz was born on a farm in Eastern Pennsylvania in 1822, and at the age of 16 was apprenticed to the blacksmith trade. In 1842 he went to work as a common laborer in a new mill being built in Norristown, Pa. to make wrought iron and to include rolling machinery for forming. When the mill went into production, Fritz was put in charge of the machinery and later he was made manager of production. In the seven years that he worked at Norristown, Fritz became experienced with all aspects of puddling and rolling of wrought iron, especially the repair and improvement of machinery. Fritz moved to Safe Harbor, Pa on the Susquehanna in 1849 where a new mill was being built which included a blast furnace. This mill was built under Fritz's supervision and he remained for the first year of operation to work out all the start-up-problems.

John Fritz's next move was to another new mill in Johnstown, Pa. This mill was called Wood, Morrell and Company, but it would later become well known as the Cambria Iron Company. An entrepreneur by the name of Daniel Morrell leased a not-yet-completed new facility in Johnstown, where two previous sets of investors had gone broke trying to build an integrated mill for producing railroad rails. This mill would use coke in its blast furnaces and would contain puddling furnaces and rolling mills.

Fritz first job, one he was now quite accomplished at, was to get all the machinery operating properly and coordinated to handle the flow of iron in its progress from the blast furnace to puddling furnaces to squeezers and finally the rolling mills. Next he found that the local ores were not suitable for the quality needed to make rails. This required convincing the always financially strapped principals to buy better ore and pay the high freight to bring it to Johnstown. This still did not solve the problem of excessive scrap during rolling. The mill was loosing money and Fritz decided that the manner of rolling would never allow a solution to the problem.

The standard method of rolling at this time was to pass the hot billet through the rolls and with pivoted tables on the output side the semi-finished rail was lifted up and shoved back across the top roll to the entrance side where it was again passed through a second groove in the rolls to further reduce the metal to a rail shape and size. The process was repeated in successively smaller openings until the final rail was formed. Fritz concluded that, since the rails were cracking in the later stages of rolling, the metal was too cold for the attempted reduction. His solution was to stack a third roll over the two working rolls with a second set of grooves between the second and third rolls so that the rail could be reduced in both directions. This helped keep the metal hot by the faster reduction and the shortened total rolling time.

Fritz designed and in 26 days built the first 3-high rolling mill. It was immediately successful, and soon all rails manufactured in the United States were made on his 3-high mill design. However, the task of starting up a new plant, solving the many mechanical and metallurgical problems and always the lack of adequate finances finally brought Fritz to what we would today call burn-out. He wrote in his notes, “After six years of as hard, laborious, faithful, vexatious work as ever fell to the lot of man to do, I decided to leave the scene of my early struggles and try my fortunes elsewhere”. The elsewhere mentioned by Fritz happened to be the new Bethlehem Iron Company where he would work the remainder of his very long career.

In the first half of the 19th century iron production increased very rapidly, from about 50,000 tons at the beginning to over 500,000 tons by 1850. The demand for this quantity of iron was coming from the railroads. Railroading started in this country in 1830 with about 10 miles of track outside of Charleston S. C. and somewhat more laid by the Baltimore and Ohio Company. By 1840 there was 3000 miles of track and 9000 miles by 1850. During the 1850s another 20,000 miles were added to give the United States about 50% of the world total, and this was before a single rail was laid west of the Mississippi. As the railroads connected the major cities of the east and pushed on into the Midwest, the demand for iron kept moving west. Also the population was moving west. In 1850 Chicago had one rail line and a population of 29,000. By 1860 it had 11 rail lines and 109,000 people. The demands for iron caused a burst of iron making west of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania and on into Kentucky and Ohio. Southeastern Ohio developed over 50 blast furnaces that supplied pig iron through the Civil War. This iron was still made using charcoal for fuel, except for the mills developing around Pittsburgh, which were using coke made from bituminous coal from nearby mines.

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