Charcoal Iron Industry Research Articles

The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750

The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750

Advance and Retreat of Charcoal Iron Industry and Rural Settlement in Bergslagen

(1960). Advance and Retreat of Charcoal Iron Industry and Rural Settlement in Bergslagen. Geografiska Annaler: Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 267-284.

Forests and Iron: The Charcoal Iron Industry of the New Jersey Highlands

merous. In several respects, conditions suitable for the production of charcoal iron were opposed to those essential for successful agriculture, and therefore ironworks were frequently concentrated in areas poorly suited to farming. In a few exceptionally well endowed regions the industry developed into a major economic activity which influenced settlement, transportation, the establishment of commercial and other industrial enterprises, and was also responsible, through the enormous quantities of fuel consumed, for the profound alteration of great areas of woodland. The New Jersey Highlands, an area in many respects representative of the major charcoal iron producing regions, were an important center of iron production before the American Revolution and remained so for more than a hundred years. This paper considers the basis of the Highlands' iron industry and certain aspects of its development and decline, and will attempt to evaluate its geographical significance.

Advance and Retreat of Charcoal Iron Industry and Rural Settlement in Bergslagen

Advance and Retreat of Charcoal Iron Industry and Rural Settlement in Bergslagen

Forests and Iron: The Charcoal Iron Industry of the New Jersey Highlands

Forests and Iron: The Charcoal Iron Industry of the New Jersey Highlands

THE FOLEY PARTNERSHIPS: THE IRON INDUSTRY AT THE END OF THE CHARCOAL ERA

T 1HROUGH the courtesy of a descendant of the Foley family, which for several generations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries shared in the control of a not inconsiderable part of the charcoal-iron industry in Britain, a number of ironworks' account books have been made available for study by the present writer.' Taken together with the Cartwright Hall MSS. (dealt with in an earlier paper in this journal)2, which overlap to a small degree with the Foley MSS., they help to provide a wide coverage of the late seventeenth-century industry. The extent of this coverage can be measured from the earliest known list of furnaces and forges in Britain, compiled in I7I7.3 All but three of the ironworks for which the Foley MSS. provide accounts, are shown in Fig. i, which also includes works referred to in the accounts and in other contemporary MSS. prior to 1717. The table on pp. 324-5 lists the ironworks by regions, with the periods for which accounts have been examined.4 The output of many of these works is summarized in an appendix. It will be appreciated that these account books contain a formidable amount of information, only a fraction of which can be incorporated in a short paper. At least five different methods of book-keeping are represented, which vary widely in the detail recorded. Some accounts are mere summaries of the year's output and the balances of materials remaining in stock; others particularize every farthing of expenditure with an embarrassing wealth of detail, but with little attempt at classifying the information. A further difficulty encountered is due to the different periods covered by the accounts of the various works. As the list shows,

The Charcoal Iron Industry in the Early Eighteenth Century

THE earliest known comprehensive list of ironworks in England and Wales was compiled in 1717 T a d source material for the study of the charcoal-iron industry prior to this date has been fragmentary, and for many areas almost non-existent. A most valuable set of manuscript ironworks accounts has recently been made available to me and most of them refer to the period 1688-1717,2 although for no works are the accounts complete for all these years. The papers cover ironworks in the central, north and west Midlands, the Forest of Dean, north and south Wales, and Sussex, though in the last three districts a total of only four works is involved. In addition to the manufacturing and commercial activities of the concerns to which the Foley accounts particularly refer, they yield much information on other works for which such detailed papers have not yet come to light and, with the help of supplementary manuscripts and published material, it has been possible to make a fair appraisal of the pattern of the iron trade in about 1700.3 Information on one important iron manufacturing region, south Yorkshire, is lacking in the Foley MSS. but accounts of several works in this district have been brought together in Bradford at Cartwright Hall.4 Although not compiled with the same attention to detail, they fill an otherwise serious gap. The account which follows provides a reasonably comprehensive picture of the iron trade in the Midlands and in the adjacent areas of the Forest of Dean, south Yorkshire, Derby and Nottingham. For the rest of the country, notably for south Wales and the Weald, the evidence is less adequate. The 1717 list of furnaces and forges appears to be substantially accurate in the light of the Foley accounts and provides an invaluable scale against which to gauge the extent to which the works concerned in them may be taken as representative of the whole industry. Figure 1 shows the distribution of works enumerated in the 1717 list. The close correlation of furnaces with the occurrence of iron ores is at once apparent; Coal Measure ironstones were the most widespread basis for the industry, except in the Forest of Dean and north Lancashire, where hsematite ores of the Carboniferous limestone were important, and in south-east England, where ironstones in the Wealden Series were used. This general pattern of blast-furnace distribution was to