No doubt some of these workers in iron—perhaps all three of them—had a hand in the experimental smelting and forging of local bog iron during Jamestown’s first year or two. Captain John Smith reported that the colony’s “best commoditie was Iron which we made into little chissels.” Archaeological excavations at Jamestown and at nearby Denbigh Plantation in recent years have disclosed the sites of what appear to have been small furnaces for smelting iron ore.
At the same time, the colonists were shipping ore back to England, seven tons of iron being smelted at Bristol from Virginia ore as early as 1608. Four years later, William Strachey wrote:
Sir Tho: Dale hath mencioned in his Letters to the [Worthies?] of the Councell of a goodly Iron myne, and Capt Newport hath brought home of that mettell so sufficient a tryall, as there hath bene made 16. or 17. tonne of Iron, so good as the East Indian Marchants bought that of the Virginian Company, preferring that before any other Iron of what Country soever.
A conjectural sketch, after Sidney King, of an earthen furnace for smelting iron. Furnaces such as this were used in England early in the seventeenth century, and similar ones may have been used at Jamestown.
In further pursuit of its determination to set up an iron industry in Virginia, the London Company advertised for blacksmiths, bellows makers, edgetool makers, cutlers, armorers, gunsmiths, iron miners, iron refiners, iron founders, hammermen, millwrights for iron mills, and colliers for charcoal making. Before the Mayflower left old Plymouth with its cargo of religious refugees, more than one hundred workmen having the required skills had sailed to Virginia, some of them to set up a full-scale ironworks at Falling Creek, about sixty miles up the James River from Jamestown.
How much iron was actually produced at the Falling Creek furnace and forge, whether largely pig iron, sow iron, or wrought iron, and whether consumed in the colony, shipped to England, or some of both, must remain matters of conjecture. A series of troubles plagued the project, but by 1619 the blast furnace, finery, forge, and chafery were reported to be “in some good forwardnesse, and a proofe is sent of Iron made there.” Two years later a new manager was sent over, and he promised “to finish the Works & have plentiful provision of Iron ... by next Easter.”
The forecast was fateful. Easter in 1622 fell on March 24. But on the morning of Good Friday, March 22, the Indians of Virginia fell on every English settlement along the James River, massacring more than 350 colonists, including 27 at Falling Creek. The redskins not only slaughtered the entire adult complement of ironworkers, but destroyed the buildings and supposedly heaved some of the machinery into the river nearby. The exact details are understandably a little vague, but the result was conclusive: the iron industry in Virginia was ended for nearly one hundred years.
EARLY IRONMASTERS
Except for bloomeries, which could have existed in every colony, the first successful ironworks in British America began production about 1645 at Saugus, Massachusetts. (In a bloomery operation a lump of iron ore—usually bog iron—is heated until it is semimolten, and then is hammered on the anvil until most impurities have been forced out; with much labor in this manner, small quantities of excellent wrought iron can be produced.) The Saugus works have been reconstructed after careful archaeological and historical research; a sort of family resemblance is to be presumed between them and the ironworks built in Virginia early in the eighteenth century.