Artisan-Entrepreneurs

The adventurers and colonial investors who initiated ironrnaking in the Salisbury district hired artisans to run bloomery forges and make products such as nails and hardware needed by settlers in the new lands. Within a few years artisan-proprietors began making these products in their own forges (see chap. 3). Then a new generation of entrepreneurs with both artisanal and managerial skills began making and selling sophisticated products to distant as well as local customers. New opportunities in the iron trade opened for them in the years before the Revolution. As they exploited these, they transformed the region’s ironmaking into a key component of the colonial industrial economy. In 1739 Richard Seymour, a Hartford smith, started ironmaking in East Canaan by building a bloomery forge on the Blackberry River. He smelted iron ore from the recently-opened mine at Ore Hill and forged products needed by the area’s settlers. A few years later he took on John Forbes, also a smith from Hartford, as a partner. Forbes’s sons, Samuel and Elisha, learned smithing from their father and the art of bloom smelting from Seymour. By 1760 they had transformed the business from one serving a local market to industrial production by expanding sales throughout southern New England and concentrating on specialized products such as sawmill gudgeons and cranks, gristmill spindles and rinds, clothiers’ screws for fulling mills, spindles for paper mills, screws for paper presses, gears, ship’s anchors weighing up to a thousand pounds, bellows pipes, logging chains, gun barrels, forge trip hammers, and nail rod. To meet the growing demand for their products, the Forbes brothers built a second bloomery forge in Canaan in 1759 and another in Norfolk in 1760; in 1761 they purchased a share in the Chatfield ore bed near Ore Hill, first opened in 1740. In 1760 they were selling forgings and mill machinery to customers throughout southern New England. They joined Allen and Hazeltine in building the region’s first blast furnace, opened a general store in East Canaan, and built grist and cider mills.