60,000 tons pig iron in 25 years is an average of 2400 tons per year. I count about 24 forges, omitting a couple that look as if they were manufacturing rather than making iron. If these made 200 tons each per year, we have 4800 tons per year, which would need 7200 tons of pig iron. This makes a total of perhaps 10,000 tons of pig iron. The industry in England and Wales made about 12,750 tons of bar iron in 1735 (at the bottom a recession) rising to about 20,000 tons in 1755. The pig iron equivalent would be a third as much again. The British iron industry was certainly larger than that of the Chesapeake. What the result would be if Pennsylvania, New England and the rest were added in, I cannot say. The statement made to Evelyne (whose name I must apologise for misspelling) would be correct if the qualification "internationally-traded" were added. Peter King 49, Stourbridge Road, Hagley, Stourbridge West Midlands DY9 0QS 01562-720368 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Arch-Metals Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Evelyne Godfrey Sent: 25 January 2007 16:35 To: Peter King Subject: Re: American pre-Revolution iron production Hi, The "Chesapeake was world's third largest producer of iron in the 18th C..." idea was something that they told me when I first come to work in Virginia (18 months ago).... indeed I think they mentioned it at the job interview, as if it were a well known fact. This is a published source for that statement: http://departments.umw.edu/hipr/www/Godfrey/Va_iron_plantations.pdf This paper also reproduces the export data from Bining, i.e. that the around 60,000 tons of pig iron was sent from the Chesapeake to Britain between 1730 and 1755. Cheers, Evelyne >>> Peter King <[log in to unmask]> 1/25/2007 9:55 AM >>> I think that most of my information came from a book by A C Bining, British Regulation of the Colonial Iron Industry. It provides data on exports, but some one needs to collect all the data and make an estimate for American production. Studies have been made of the pre-Revolutionary industry in several states, but I do not think any one has drawn all this together. The American industry appears only to have begun to take off about 1720, though there were a few earlier ironworks. Before that America was almost entirely dependent on Britain. I know of some research which will be undertaken into the trade in manufactured iron, but it will be a while before it is complete, yet alone published. The trade data is available for each colony (or group of them), but only aggregate figures have been published. Evelyn Godfrey's statement about manufacture in America was too strong. The prohibition (in 1750) was designed to limit its expansion, and was probably not in practice enforced. I suspect that the attempt to rank countries in order of size of production is rash. I have never seen any estimate of the size of the industry in France, Germany or Italy; all had a significant iron industry and they were far closer to being self-sufficient than Britain. The population of France was bigger than that of Britain and its iron industry may have been too. We notice the Russian and Swedish industries, because they were heavily export-orientated, as was that of Virginia and Maryland, whereas the industry in New England and Pennsylvania was much less concerned with export. Peter King 49, Stourbridge Road, Hagley, Stourbridge West Midlands DY9 0QS 01562-720368 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Arch-Metals Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of James Brothers Sent: 25 January 2007 00:52 To: Peter King Subject: Re: American pre-Revolution iron production There is ample evidence that the colonies were producing about as much iron as England right up to the time of the Revolution. English production, due to the adoption of coke as a fuel, takes off in the last quarter of the 1700s and England is the leading producer of iron by 1800. It was not all shipped back to England, most of it stayed in the colonies. The Chesapeake industry was geared toward export. But even so there was enough demand for local cast iron products that Alexander Spotswood build a foundry (double air furnace) at Massaponnax around 1732. A total of 16 blast furnaces were running at one time or another during the 1700s in Virginia. While Issac Zane started out shipping iron to England, he found it much more profitable to sell locally, or ship to Philadelphia. Almost all of the iron produced in Pennsylvania, NY, and NJ was consumed locally. And we are talking thousands of tons. Peter King has been able to trace a bit over 7,000 tons of iron from colonial furnaces to Britain during the 1st half of the 1700s. But that is a small fraction of American production. I wrote my MA on this. If you want lots of data, I can send you more. James Brothers, RPA [log in to unmask] On Jan 24, 2007, at 17:06, Torbert, Barton wrote: Thanks for the reply. So once war was declared all the production would have stayed in-country. So you seem to be saying that there was significant American production available no matter how it was previously accounted for. Where was the ore coming from for the iron production in the Chesapeake region? Bart -----Original Message----- From: Arch-Metals Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Evelyne Godfrey Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 2:42 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Falling Creek IW side question Hi, I think that the situation so long as the American colonies were under British control was that colonists were banned from keeping or selling locally produced iron; cast iron was just being produced in America, and it all had to be shipped straight to Britain where it could be taxed and some of it perhaps sold back to the colonists. This was one of the points of contention at the time of the Revolution. Of course by then, colonists were regularly flouting the laws and casting cannons and all sorts to use against the British Army. Supposedly by the mid-18th century, the Chesapeake region (Maryland and Virginia) had been the worlds third biggest iron producer, after Russia and Sweden, but colonial iron would have counted as "British" production rather than "American" per se. The English settlers from Jamestown, who built that blast furnace at Falling Creek just twelve years after arriving, were presumably being pushed by the Virginia Company back in London to establish some sort of profitable industry as soon as possible... they had started out looking for gold of course, and when that didn't pan out as it were, they decided to go after the iron ore. Even though work at Falling Creek came to an abrupt end with the massacre of 1622, iron remained Virginia's second big 'cash crop', alongside tobacco, up until the late 18th C, and the blast furnaces were organised according to the plantation system, just like the tobacco growing, i.e. with slave labour (sadly, slaves continued to make up the bulk of the workforce in the Virginia iron industry right up until 1864). cheers, Evelyne Bart Torbert <[log in to unmask]> 1/24/2007 3:42 PM >>> This discussion brings up a side question. What was the iron production in pre-Revolutionary America? The question is relative to the Americans ability to provide war needs from native sources. Bart -------------- Original message ---------------------- From: Steve Gray <[log in to unmask]> The precursors of the furnaces are more likely to be Welsh rather than English, from such counties as Carmarthenshire, Glamorgan and Gwent. Yours Steve Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter King To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:08 AM Subject: Re: Falling Creek IW The precursors of the furnace would inevitably be English. I cannot think of evidence from 1620s or earlier, but later English furnaces had systems for draining water from below the furnace, but I think the foundations would have been in stone. However, at that period, timber-framing of buildings was still common in England, with lath and plaster between the timbers. It is thus quite possible that other parts of the furnace buildings would be of timber, not to mention the waterwheel. The traditional view is that furnaces went into blast in the autumn and blew until the early summer. While this was not invariably done in places where the water-supply was good enough, it almost certainly has an element of truth in it. I would have expected May to be the anticipated end of the first blast, not its start. On the other hand, if the furnace was in blast at the time of the massacre, I would expect it still to be (or have been) there and full of its large charge. This is of course all speculation. Peter King 49, Stourbridge Road, Hagley, Stourbridge West Midlands DY9 0QS 01562-720368 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Arch-Metals Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of James Brothers Sent: 23 January 2007 02:47 To: Peter King Subject: Falling Creek IW Lyle Browning, the Falling Creek IW archaeologist, has proposed a number of possible explanations for the timbers recently discovered at the site. While much of the equipment at an ironworks (e.g. wheel, bellows, anvil, and hammer) rested on substantial timber structures, is there evidence elsewhere for heavy wood foundations for blast furnaces? Or is this more likely to be part of the wheel support/foundation or some other part of the water power system? Or is there another possibility that hasn't been thought of yet? If Winchester Cathedral could be built on a raft, why not a blast furnace? James Brothers, RPA [log in to unmask]