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.

Merchant Capitalists

Bloomery forges could not produce cast items such as hollowware, potash kettles, or the hammerheads and anvil bases artisans needed for their forges. With a blast furnace, an ironmaker could both increase the scale of iron smelting and provide customers with iron castings. However, in colonial times a furnace required an investment of over £3,000, while a fully equipped bloomery forge cost only about £500. Additionally, blast furnace proprietors had to assemble a workforce at least ten times larger than they would need for a bloomery, provide a continuous supply of ore and fuel over a period of months, and create a stable organization to manage the whole enterprise. Bankruptcies among the initial furnace owners in Salisbury showed how difficult these tasks could be. Philip Livingston, proprietor of the manor across the border in New York, had access to capital that no one in Connecticut could match. In 1743 he had a blast furnace built at Ancram, in the western part of his manor, to smelt ore brought over the Connecticut border from Ore Hill. Nineteen years elapsed before Ethan Allen and his partners managed to launch the first such venture in the Salisbury district. Blast furnace proprietors needed an absolutely reliable water supply, since they had to keep their furnace’s running continuously for months. The place closest to Ore Hill that could provide such a supply was the outlet of Wononskopomuc Lake, soon to be renamed Furnace Pond. Water from this lake could run the approximately two-horsepower air pump needed for an eighteenth-century blast furnace throughout the year. A thriving colonial economy in 1760 encouraged John Hazeltine of Massachusetts—founder of the town of Upton, dealer in lands, and proprietor of the bloomery forge in Sutton—to send his son Paul to scout out investment opportunities in mineral-rich and underpopulated Salisbury. Here Paul met Ethan Allen, later to gain fame at Fort Ticonderoga, who had just sold his Cornwall farm for fifty pounds.

Industrial Ecology in Historical Perspective

Industry consumes natural resources and makes wastes as it manufactures and delivers products to consumers. Subsequent use of a product— its eventual discard, recycling, or storage in a waste depository—puts additional demands on the environment. Decisions made by many different individuals direct the progress of a product through manufacture, use, and disposal. In the past, each decision maker along this chain responded to concerns that encompassed only a fraction of the product’s progression from raw materials to ultimate fate. No one had much reason to enlarge these decision horizons as long as natural resources remained abundant, and the industrial impact on the environment was small compared with natural processes of environmental change. Now people in the western industrialized nations realize that their consumption of goods and services could change the environment in ways that rival natural causes. Their heightened awareness led scientists and engineers to start systematically investigating the life cycles of industrial products. These investigators soon found that Western industry has created a web of resource use so complex that tracing the demands made by even a single, simple product on the environment requires the new analytical methods of industrial ecology. Industrial ecologists see the farm and the factory as the main sources of environmental change caused by people. With their focus on the factory, along with its associated mines, power plants, and transportation systems, they search out the consequences of consuming natural resources to make and use material goods and generate energy. They study resources consumed, wastes released, and the fate of discarded products. They may include in their research advocacy of, and searching for, means to minimize the environmental impacts of industry. They look to a future where recycling eliminates all wastes and where energy comes from renewable resources. Most see a guiding principle in sustainability, the concept that each generation should leave to the next undiminished opportunities for fulfillment of material needs. People make their decisions about the production, consumption, and disposal of material goods in terms of the costs and benefits they perceive, and they may be unwilling to bear extra costs for environmental benefits that offer them no immediate rewards.

Independent Artisans

By 1730 New England colonists needed increasingly large amounts of iron for their expanding economy. Shipsmiths forged iron fastenings used in the vessels they built for the coastal and West Indian trades. The mariners who sailed these ships wanted large, strong iron anchors. Millwrights needed waterwheel axles and gudgeons, spindles, and numerous other iron components for gristmills, sawmills, fulling mills, and oil mills. Builders of the forges and furnaces that smelted and shaped iron products had to have iron hammerheads and forge plates. The pioneers on the frontier in New York and northern New England wanted massive iron kettles for boiling potash, usually the first cash crop they got off their newly cleared land. Everyone needed nails. Building a bloomery forge offered an adventurer in Connecticut’s Western Lands the easiest way to start making iron. One man could run a forge, although a helper made the work easier. The bloomery proprietor needed less capital than would be required for other types of ironworks. The region had plenty of easily developed water privileges of the right size to power a bloomery forge. Although it took skill and practice to make high-quality metal, a forge owner or hired hand could learn enough of the bloom smelting technique from an experienced smith within a few months to make serviceable metal. Iron of ordinary quality satisfied most people’s needs in the early days of the northwest. If the weather were bad, ore or fuel were unavailable, crops demanded attention, or the market of iron were slow, the proprietor could easily shut down his forge at short notice and restart it as soon as conditions improved. Although a bloomery forge could be part of an enterprise employing fifty or more hands, it could also be little more than a smithy in size and complexity. A farmer could accumulate enough money to build one. Alternatively, a number of individuals might take shares in a forge run by a single artisan. The proprietors of a mercantile business, or of grist or sawmills on the same or a nearby water privilege, could easily add a bloomery to their other enterprises.

Resources Discovered

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.

Community, Culture, and Industrial Ecology

The people who settied northwestern Connecticut created an agricultural surplus that allowed them to undertake industrial ventures within a few years of their arrival. Their knowledge of the mechanical arts, coupled with the region’s natural resources, gave them opportunities to make material goods needed by their neighbors. Successive generations continued industrial use of the region’s natural resources over the next two centuries, each making its own choices about how to structure its enterprise within the framework of values and beliefs held separately by individuals and in common within the community. Each had to respond to changes in markets and the advent of new products and techniques. These opportunities, and the participants’ choices about how to use them, combined to create the region’s industrial ecology. Like the rest of the New England hill country, northwestern Connecticut had two abundant, renewable natural resources: streams with steep gradients and reliable flow for waterpower, and forest that covered the large areas that were too steep or too thinly mantled with soil for decent pasture. Millwrights could easily build waterpower systems on the streams, and farmers could manage the forest for continuous production of fuel wood, since it regrew trees to useful size within about twenty years. Unlike other highlands, however, northwestern Connecticut had a unique mineral resource: iron ore beds unmatched elsewhere in New England. Everyone in the newly settled lands and on the frontiers expanding into Vermont and New York in the early eighteenth century needed iron products. As described in chapter 3, individuals throughout the Salisbury district, aided by family members or fluid partnerships, built bloomery forges that they operated as components of their cropping, husbandry, or mercantile enterprises. Nearly every family in Kent and the other new towns had a partner in one of the forges. Individuals lacking metallurgical skills or access to any capital dug ore or cut wood. Others developed their skills as colliers or millwrights. Negotiated exchanges of labor and services among these artisans promoted interdependence within the community. As the colonists in southern New England increasingly mechanized their grain, timber, and cloth production in the mid—eighteenth century, they brought a new opportunity to the ironmakers of the Salisbury disno trict. By making standard parts for grain mills, sawmills, fulling mills, and oil mills that they could distribute widely, Salisbury ironmakers added value to the bar iron they made and enlarged the scope of their market.

A Landscape Transformed

Fluctuations in the national economy buffeted the Salisbury iron industry, but choices Salisbury’s own ironmakers made about metallurgical technique determined both its course and its demands on the environment. A year-by-year count of the number of Salisbury forges and furnaces shows the rise and decline of the district’s ironmaking, modulated by fluctuations in the national (or, earlier, colonial) economy. The district’s bloomery forges made the wrought-iron products most wanted in the early eighteenth century. Because of the limited demand for castings (as well as the large investment required), a single blast furnace sufficed in the district until 1810. By then, the Salisbury ironmakers had entered the market for high-quality wrought iron made by the indirect process and needed to enlarge the supply of pig iron for the new finery forges that began to supplant the old bloomeries. Local entrepreneurs added two new furnaces. By 1848, sixteen furnaces met the demand for pig from the additional finery forges built from 1825 through 1833, together with the requirements of the new puddling works. The smaller furnaces that specialized in making forge pig lost their market as the fineries, followed by the puddling works, closed in the 1850s. The remaining furnaces, making pig iron for foundries that specialized in chilled-iron railroad wheels, carried on until the railroads’ adoption of steel wheels curtailed this market in the twentieth century. The national ebb and flow of business, along with disruptions caused by war, modulated the trends established by the techniques the Salisbury ironmasters chose and the types of products they sold. Investment in bloomeries accelerated during the colonial prosperity of the 1740s and slowed during the wars with the French and the Revolution. Return of settled times in the early Republic led many individuals and partnerships to build bloomery forges in the years up to 1807 and to invest in furnaces and finery forges. Hard times after the War of 1812 suspended new investment. The period of the district’s greatest growth fell in the economic expansion from 1824 through 1837, when New England entrepreneurs made rapid progress in developing the American system of manufactures based on interchangeable parts and power-driven machine tools.

Retreat from Progress

Salisbury ironmakers throve by selling wrought iron rather then cast iron through the first half of the nineteenth century. Their finery forges and puddling works converted nearly all of the pig produced by the district’s furnaces to bar iron or forged products. However, by the 1860s, when the district’s ironmasters were smelting up to 11,800 tons of pig iron per year, they converted little of it to wrought iron. The demise of the forges left just one principal product, cast iron used mainly for railroad car wheels. Milo Barnum and Leonard Richardson had started making railroad castings in 1840. When Milo Barnum retired in 1852, his son W. H. Barnum took his place in the partnership with Richardson. The partners expanded the business by acquiring the Beckley and Forbes furnaces in 1858 and 1862, respectively, from the Adam family in East Canaan. Upon Leonard Richardson’s death, Barnum and the Richardson heirs reconstituted the business as the Barnum-Richardson Company, the firm that gradually gained control of all mines and blast furnaces in the northwest, except for the Kent furnace. A new railway facilitated the Barnum-Richardson operations. Dedicated residents of the northwest, in the face of much skepticism, raised the capital needed to build the Connecticut Western Railroad from Hartford to State Line, where it joined with the Dutchess & Columbia line running to Beacon, New York. Salisbury residents eagerly awaited its 1871 completion: they wanted to be rid of the heavy ore wagons that kept their roads a rness passing from Ore Hill to the furnaces in East Canaan. The Connecticut Western passed through Winsted, traversed difficult terrain in Norfolk, and crossed the Housatonic Railroad at Canaan, where the two companies built a handsome union station . Railroad enthusiasm also led residents in the northwest to propose impractical schemes. The Shepaug Railroad had been completed in 1872 from Danbury to Litchfield. A correspondent writing to the Connecticut Western News that year proposed extension into the Salisbury district.

Environment, Technology, and Community in Salisbury

Salisbury’s particular combination of natural resources allowed iron- making to continue for nearly 200 years from its 1736 start. In the first hundred years of mining and smelting, the district’s entrepreneurs had established a place for themselves in the national market for high-quality iron products while they managed their mineral, waterpower, and forest resources to meet the demands of expanded production. Each resource offered different challenges. An ironmaker could cut wood without thought of replacement or could manage woodland for sustained yield. As miners dug deeper for ore, they had more spoil to dispose of. They also had to devise drainage systems for their pits. Waterpower systems needed maintenance, repairs after freshets, control of their watersheds if siltation of the power ponds was to be avoided, and cooperative agreements among users. To meet the demands of expanding business, a forge owner might have to develop a new power site, as Forbes & Adam did when they put their second rolling mill in Woodville instead of Canaan. Fuel supply eventually proved the most critical natural resource problem for the ironmakers. Woodland previously burned by Indians made a good initial source of ironworks fuel, since wood from small trees coaled easily. The Lakeville blast furnace had a capacity of 2.5 tons of iron per day and fuel consumption of 250 bushels of charcoal per ton of iron made. In 1776 the furnace operated seven months, the length of a typical blast, and so would have made about 525 tons of iron while consuming fuel from about 200 acres (0.3 square miles) of woodland. At this rate of production, the furnace would have consumed at most 5.4 square miles of forest, 9 percent of the area of the town of Salisbury, between its start-up date (1762) and 1780. An eighteenth-century bloomery typically made about 250 pounds of iron per day with a fuel rate of about six. If it worked 300 days per year (a high estimate), it would have used wood at the rate of 42 acres per year. From 1736 to 1780, one bloomery would have consumed the wood from 2.9 square miles of forest.

The Challenge of New Markets and Techniques

Ironmakers in the Middle Atlantic states used canals and railways to reduce costs and expand the scale of production with new techniques based on mineral-coal fuel beginning in the 1820s. Salisbury forge and furnace proprietors, who still had teamsters hauling ore, fuel, and metal along dirt roads with wagons in summer and sleds in winter, knew that improved transportation systems would help them get their products to outside buyers. They were less aware that canals and railroads would eventually force them to confront new techniques adopted by ironmakers outside their district. Entrepreneurs in northwestern Connecticut had become interested in waterways as early as 1760, when they wanted to improve the Housatonic’s channel north to Massachusetts in order to float logs downriver to their sawmills. Although the General Assembly authorized a lottery to raise £300 for the project in 1761, the promoters accomplished nothing. The start of construction on the Erie Canal stimulated interest in building a canal along the Housatonic River that would open new markets for the northwest’s ironmakers. Urged on by John M. Holley and others, the Ousatonic Canal proprietors organized a company in 1822 to build from tidewater to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. However, when canal engineer Benjamin Wright’s survey showed the company would have to build enough locks to raise boats a total of 604 feet as they traversed the canal, the project’s supporters backed out. The promoters of the Sharon Canal project, intended to start in Sharon and go down the Oblong River into New York and thence follow the route later used by the Harlem Railroad, accomplished even less. John M. Holley had experienced railroad travel on his 1831 trip to Harpers Ferry. He and his neighbors realized that a railway up the Housatonic valley would gather traffic from the region’s ironworks and, with a connection to the Western Railroad in Massachusetts, open the first year-round route from New York City to Albany. (The railroad along the Hudson River between New York and Albany did not open until 1851.) Several of the region’s ironmasters, including J. M. Holley’s son A. H. Holley, helped raise funds for the construction of the Housatonic Railroad when the state issued a charter in 1836.