The adventurers who entered Connecticut’s Western Lands in 1730 I began ironmaking more than a hundred years after colonists first exploited the ore and fuel resources of British North America. The early colonists who set about making iron for export met with ill fortune: in 1621 Indians massacred the artisans who had just completed a furnace and forge at Falling Creek, Virginia. Scarce capital, inadequate skills, and poor transatlantic communication bankrupted the proprietors of the Saugus, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, ironworks by 1675. When King George I got Parliament to restrain trade between England and Sweden in 1717, British manufacturers, cut off from their supplies of Scandinavian iron, began investing in American forges and furnaces. Conclusion of the seventeenth-century Indian wars had left large areas rich in timber and ore along the east coast safe for industry. New immigrants, primarily from Britain and Germany, brought their metallurgical skills to America, and colonists supported by British investors built ironworks first in Maryland and then in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey, to produce metal for the export market. Americans in the Middle Atlantic colonies made enough iron by 1750 to provoke British regulation of their trade. The colonists made themselves the world’s third-largest iron producers by 1775 and, despite the predominance of agriculture, had firmly established industry in British North America. New Englanders lagged behind the Middle Atlantic colonists in ironmaking. Artisans from the failed Saugus works in Massachusetts slowly reestablished smelting on a small scale and by 1730 were building new works in the southeastern part of their colony. In New York, Robert Livingston had by 1685 gained control of an enormous manor adjacent to northwestern Connecticut. In 1730 he wanted to add iron to his manor’s products so that he could ship metal down the Hudson River to colonial and overseas customers. However, neither Livingston nor the Massachusetts ironmakers had anything like the high-grade ore resources discovered by the adventurers in Connecticut’s Western Lands. Fifty-two years after English colonists established themselves in Connecticut, James II sent Edmund Andros to British North America to set up a unified government over the New England colonies.
Coastal Climate Adaptation Literatures of the Southeast and Northeast U.S.: Regional Comparisons among States and Document Sources
