The iron industry is often spoken of as the barometer of a people’s civilization. If all iron and iron products and their influence upon the world should be obliterated, it seems impossible that we could be even started on the road to civilization.
No matter how we try, probably none of us ever realizes the immensity and importance of the iron and steel industry with approximately 460 huge blast furnaces here, 5000 cast and malleable iron foundries, about 1000 Bessemer and open-hearth steel and some 3000 puddling furnaces, and the many thousands of factories which each day are turning the products of these into rails, plate, wire, pipe, and the infinitude of finished articles which enter into and are mighty factors of our civilization. Yet with these furnaces, forges and factories at our very doors, 99.9 per cent of us are entirely oblivious to their wonders and to their presence except to be annoyed by their noise and smoke. Even the blacksmiths and their service we scarcely note, though they are daily fashioning for us a material which is vastly more important and more wonderful than any of the “Seven Wonders of the World.”
CHAPTER II
THE RAW MATERIALS
A story has it that a minister once visited a friend who was a zoölogist. Upon realizing for the first time how highly organized a creature was the humble earth-worm with its three-layer skin covering, alimentary canal, nephridia or excretory system, reproductory organs, rude nervous system, and setæ for purposes of locomotion, he exclaimed: “Wonderful! I had always supposed that worms were only skin and squash.”
With millions of tons of heavy reddish-brown earth from northern Michigan and Minnesota going by our doors continuously during the shipping season, the position of most of us is very similar to that of the minister relative to the earth-worm. We know that something is going on but we are not aware of its importance or the immensity of it.
Iron Ore
Almost every one knows that there are extensive copper deposits along the Lake Superior shore of what is now northern Michigan. In the 17th century word of these was several times taken to Europe where in old publications was mentioned a huge ingot of copper from which the Indians chopped pieces with their hatchets. At that early date maps of the region were drawn which are wonderfully accurate, and, from time to time over a period of a century and a half, adventurers attempted to gain wealth in this favored region.
Map Showing Distribution of Iron Ores of America
However, despite the definite knowledge of considerable mineral wealth there and rumored claims of much more, Michigan at the time of her admission to the Union in 1836 bitterly opposed having what is now the northern peninsula included within her territory in lieu of a ten mile wide strip of northern Indiana and Ohio, and it has been said that she nearly went to war to resist it. Even after the discovery of the iron ore deposits, no one realized the full importance of the minerals of this region.