The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume IX October, 1932
Number 4
IRON -MAKIN G— A FORGOTTEN INDUSTRY
OF NORTH CAROLINA
By Lester J. Cappon
In the story of the new industrial South, North Carolina has
played a leading role. She has reaped the fruits of an early
awakening to the potentialities of manufacturing in her inviting
piedmont area and she has suffered the first social upheaval that
seems inevitably to accompany the development of industrialism at
certain stages. So flourishing, until recently, has her textile industry
become that the existence of an earlier manufacturing enterprise
in the same region has been almost completely forgotten; yet, if,
a century ago, her pulse was quickened by the stimulus of industry,
the smoke of numerous iron forges and furnaces as well as the hum
of cotton mills bore witness to the young industrial revolution.
Bog ore, exploited earliest by the English colonists in the low¬
lands of the tidewater region, was the basis for considerable iron¬
making in seventeenth century Virginia, Maryland and New Eng¬
land, but no account of similar activity during the early years of
North Carolina has survived, although it is known that small quanti¬
ties of pig iron were shipped to England in 1728-29 and 1734.*1
The first iron works of record were erected in the piedmont.
Scattered over this wide area two principal kinds of ore, often in
close proximity, have been left as a heritage of geological ages.
Magnetite, hard and black, containing when pure over 70 per cent
metallic iron, was formed as veins in the old crystalline rocks in both
the piedmont and the mountain regions. This ore, though rendered
loss valuable by its combination with titanium, ranked highest in
1 J. L. Bishop, History of American Manufactures, 1608-1860 (Philadelphia, 1861),
I, 626, 628; C. D. Wright, The Industrial Evolution of the United States (New York,
1895), 99; J. M. Swank, History of the Manufacture of Iron in All Ayes ( Phil a del pin 4
1892), 105-06.
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