In previous posts, we saw how early Brandon settlers looking for iron also discovered kaolin and how kaolin miners might or might not have discovered a giant frog in 1865. So let’s take a look at the early iron industry in Brandon, going back to when Brandon was called Neshobe.
Prior to the American Revolution, Neshobe was very much a distant outpost of Mother England. In that role, New England was a land of great resource abundance, especially with respect to the dominant energy source: wood. Producing iron required enormous amounts of wood, roughly a half-acre of forest for every ton of iron. By 1750, close to 95% of the trees in England had been cut, mostly for shipbuilding, home heat, and energy for making iron, glass, and pottery. Forests that remained were either difficult to reach or were reserved by the King for the Royal Navy. Many English towns had outlawed expanding pottery and glass production because these industries made it harder for residents to afford firewood to heat their homes. However, iron manufacturers had more political connections and were harder to challenge in their pursuit of available energy supplies.
With energy supplies limited, expanding British iron production required an expanding empire. By the 1600s, English iron ore was being smelted using Irish forests. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the Irish were running short on trees too and were less than happy with the arrangement. The discovery of New World forests must have seemed like striking oil in Vermont would in today’s economy.
While colonial iron production used wood for smelting iron ore, water power was essential for operating bellows to force air into forges and furnaces and for powering trip hammers and foundries used in manufacturing iron into useful products.
Forest Dale furnace site as it appeared in 1915. Water wheel and blast machinery were for forcing air into the furnace to achieve higher temperatures. Photo courtesy of the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.Minutes of the October, 1787 Proprietors Meeting, Brandon Town Clerk’s Office Book 4
Early Neshobe provided seemingly endless forests and a lovely river, so early European settlers wasted no time before looking for iron ore. At the 1787 Brandon Proprietors Meeting, the Proprietors voted to reserve a five-acre pitch at the “School Falls” to be leased for the construction of an ironworks “if sufficient ore could be found to operate it.”
Minutes of the October, 1787 Proprietors Meeting, Brandon Town Clerk’s Office Book 4
A committee was appointed to transact the lease, and one of the first leaseholders, Penuel Child, operated a bloomery forge, an early type of ironworking furnace, on land leased from the town and produced shovels. In Vermont in 1787, there was probably a lot of work to be done with a shovel.
It turned out that Brandon had two kinds of iron ore, both in Forest Dale: bog iron on the surface and brown hematite ore deep underground.
Bog iron is relatively young iron ore that forms at the earth’s surface in swamps or bogs. It would have been the first ore to be extracted. There are a couple of different theories about how bog iron forms. The older theory suggested that iron-rich sediment washes downhill and settles in swampy areas, pretty much the way kaolin formed under quartzite cliffs in our last post. Newer thinking is that iron-rich water from underground rises in swamps or bogs and forms iron oxide deposits, often in a process involving iron-loving, orange-colored bacteria. In either event, bog iron was fairly common from Bennington to Milton at the foot of the western slopes of the Green Mountains. These deposits could be worked by men with shovels and very little capital expense.
Hematite ores, on the other hand, are more commonly found underground when tectonic plate movement brings iron from the earth’s core closer to the surface. Although hematite sometimes contained higher iron content than bog iron, mining it generally required a larger outlay to bring ore to the surface from underground. Eventually, mine shafts in Forest Dale were well over 100 feet deep and employed steam-powered hoists for lifting ore, pumps for removing water from the shafts, and an ore-washing machine.
In a 1787 version of today’s Brandon Economic Development Department, the Town Proprietors saw the value in reserving a five-acre “pitch” of undeeded land for an ironworks because of the benefit that would provide to the young Town. Bog iron was carted from Forest Dale to Brandon village, where it was melted in simple forges called “bloomeries” to produce red-hot flower-like “blooms” of iron. A good bloomer with decent ore and plenty of charcoal could produce four 100-pound blooms of iron in a day, or 60 tons a year. Iron was used locally for essentials such as horseshoes, nails, and Penuel Child’s shovels, eliminating the need to import these items.
Could the original Proprietors imagine that in five decades, Brandon would be producing well over 2,500 tons of iron annually and shipping everything from kettles to cannons as far away as Ohio? How did the iron industry grow so quickly, and why did it stop? And what was the impact on the forests?
Len Schmidt and Jennie Masterson live on Wolf Tree Forest, a wild, working woodlot about 3 miles from the Forest Dale blast furnace.
