Cranberry iron mine: iron for the Confederacy

              CRANBERRY IRON MINE
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Iron for the Confederacy
During the Civil War, natural
resources such as salt, lead, and
iron were highly prized commodi-ties
in the Confederacy. The govern-ment
relied especially on small
rural ironworks for the metals need-ed
to manufacture cannons, swords,
and firearms. Ruben White first
mined iron ore in this area in the
1780s. By 1860, the Cranberry Iron
Corporation operated a bloomery
forge on Cranberry Creek. Jordan
C. Hardin ran the mine, and his
father, John Hardin, was the local
postmaster. In a bloomery, burning
charcoal melted the iron from the
ore. Workers used an iron bar to
stir and gather the resulting mass,
which was carried to the forge and
hammered to drive out impurities,
and then further hammered into
flat bars of iron.
Forty to sixty men were
employed at Cranberry during the
war, mining ore and forging iron
for the Confederacy. Once a month,
the bar iron was loaded in a wagon,
and Peter Hardin, a local slave,
drove the wagon down the mountain
to Camp Vance, near Morganton.
There, the iron was loaded on a
train and transported to foundries
throughout the South that produced
munitions for the war effort.
Following the war, the Cran-berry
mine property changed hands
several times. Former Confederate
Gen. Robert F. Hoke owned the
Major funding for this project was provided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, through the Transportation Enhancement Program of the Federal Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21st Century.
Gen. Robert F. Hoke
Courtesy Library of Congress
Jordan C. Hardin
Courtesy Mike Hardin
operation for several years, and he
and his associates incorporated the
Cranberry Iron and Coal Company
in 1873. The mine was worked spo-radically
through the first half of
the twentieth century.
Bloomery forge,
Frederick Overman,
The Manufacture
of Iron (1850)