Legally, no colonial forge with trip hammer, rolling mill to fashion wrought iron plate, or slitting mill to turn the plate into bars could be built after Parliament passed the Iron Act of 1750. But the law seems to have had little effect, and Virginia smiths called for more and more bar iron to make farm tools and ironwork for wagons, mills, and ships.
The demand was so great that most bar iron produced in the colonies was consumed by local blacksmiths. In 1764, for example, Colonel John Tayloe, who owned ironworks in King George County, found he could sell his whole output locally. Robert Carter, the planter-entrepreneur of Nomini Hall and partner in the Baltimore iron Works, sold large quantities of bar iron in Williamsburg and to blacksmiths elsewhere in Virginia.
By 1770 William Hunter’s works at Falmouth, said to be the largest in America at that time, were turning one and one-half tons of pig iron into bars every day. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson, who had a small interest in three blast furnaces in his home county of Albermarle and who later owned a nail making machine and sold its output, counted eight ironworks in Virginia. He reported that they produced about 4,400 tons of pig iron and more than 900 tons of bar iron annually.
THE COUNTRY BLACKSMITH
Two blacksmiths and a gunsmith, as we have seen, came to Jamestown with the earliest settlers, recruited for the obvious reason that their crafts were vital to the survival of any settlement in the wilderness. From the start, both the London Company and the colonial assembly tried to persuade smiths to migrate, and, when they reached the New World, to practice their craft.
By way of encouragement, the assembly exempted from taxes and levies artisans who engaged in their crafts and did not plant tobacco. In 1657, in order to assure smiths, tanners, and weavers ample raw materials to work with, it forbade the exportation of iron, hides, and wool. This latter law had a checkered career: it was repealed the next year, reenacted two years later, repealed as a failure after eleven years, reenacted once more after another eleven years, and immediately repealed by royal order as a threat to the trade and commerce of England.
Through it all the supply of working smiths remained small in the colony of Virginia, and their charges skyrocketed. The county courts were given regulatory powers “by reason of the unconscionable rates, [that] smiths do exact on the inhabitants of this countrey for their worke.” Later and for another reason—the runaway inflation that accompanied the Revolution—prices of many commodities were commonly fixed. For instance, the price of bar iron (a consumer item for smiths) was set by a Williamsburg town meeting of July 16, 1779, at 800 shillings per ton and eightpence per pound “for the present month.”
Shown in this illustration from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, published in several eighteenth-century editions in London, are the basic pieces of equipment in a blacksmith’s shop—then and since. Actually, the bellows connection shown is faulty: the draft must come up through the firebed, not blow across the top of it.
Actually the greatest obstacles to the growth in seventeenth-century Virginia of any large manufactory of iron and steel articles were the scarcities of cash money and, even more simply, of towns. Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, in their report to the London Board of Trade, entitled The Present State of Virginia, and the College, described the situation in 1697: