On Jan 20, 2007, at 10:37 PM, Sunshine49 wrote:
> Thanks for all this, wow, quite interesting. I hope the site is
> fairly well protected,
It is police patrolled, but it is also under water for over half of
the day with the high tides.
> once people see those timbers in the newspaper pictures, I'd worry
> about souvenir hunters down there cutting out pieces to take home.
That was a major worry about publicizing the find, but we decided to
proceed as it was so incredibly interesting.
> I was amazed to see how well preserved they are. Might there be a
> full archaeological exploration of the area, to find where the
> 1621/22 iron workers lived?
The working presumption is that the workers lived on top of the hill
behind the charging bridge. That area is now an apartment complex,
but it may be possible later to do something. We will definitely be
looking first at the County owned land before a museum is put in,
assuming things go as planned.
> Were they buried at the site?
Any workers who died prior to the Powhatan coup de main were probably
buried at the site. As for those who were killed by the Powhatans,
that's unknown.
> Is it possible it might be as rich with relatively untouched
> artifacts as they have been finding at Jamestown?
Probably not. But rich is relative. Work sites tend not to have much
besides work items, but ironworkers are a thirsty lot and we would
expect to find a full range of drinking vessels and of course the
working items they may have lost or discarded.
> Aside from finding the ironworking technology at the site,
For us, the history of technology is the most fascinating. Iron was
undergoing technological change in the period and we want to see what
their technological level of sophistication was as well.
> I would think finding how the ironworkers lived would be very
> unique. Not merchants or farmers or the wealthy, but ironworkers.
> People like that probably aren't very well represented in the records.
Out there on the frontier, we'd expect post-in-ground architecture of
a type similar to Jamestown. Archaeology progressed from "Big House"
archaeology to slave archaeology so there's a fairly strong
representation of housing types. Unfortunately, there are, as you
indicate, hardly any records of industrial workers until archaeology
gets into the picture in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Investigations of worker housing in industrial towns has been the norm.
For us industrial archaeologists, that's inverted as we want to know
about the technology being used.
For instance, we looked at the timbers at Falling Creek. There's a
sort of wooden box submerged in the deposits on the opposite side of
the cut and when we looked at it, we saw that the boards were sawn
using a circular saw. That immediately said post-1850 when the
circular saw was in widespread use in VA.
We looked at the timbers uncovered and all of them were sawn using a
vertical saw. The vertical marks are irregular, indicating that they
were pit sawn rather than sawmill sawn. That puts them prior to 1850
but can't separate Cary from VA Company. The use of wrought nails
also puts them prior to the 1780's when machine cut nails first came
into use but again, cannot differentiate Cary from VA Company
manufacture. These are the obvious things we would look at, along
with timber joinery techniques to see if we can add to the weight of
evidence for the VA Company.
Thus far, strata are the key to the identification as VA Company
versus Cary. Absence of forge materials in the lower deposits is the
key. Dendrochronology is going to be done to give us more exact
dates. If we can find bark wood, then we're in business as the dendro
people can give a year when it was cut. If it's interior wood, then
several samples dating to pre-1622 would do the trick. Any wood there
dating after that means we're dealing with any of the 3 17th century
attempts or something that Cary did in the 18th. We certainly want to
be able to show absolutely that what we have is part of the VA
Company ironworks.
> I hope I can get down there one day to see it for myself.
We will have open days and we will have a tour day in March that will
have it on display with guided tours.
Lyle Browning
>
> Nancy
>
> -------
> I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
>
> --Daniel Boone
>
>
>
> On Jan 20, 2007, at 9:55 PM, Lyle E. Browning wrote:
>
>> Allow me to clarify the sequence of events concerning the Falling
>> Creek Ironworks. What was uncovered by recent floods was the
>> culmination of a series of floods starting with Hurricane Fran,
>> Gaston and a few others. They successively peeled back the bank.
>> Then two minor storms that dumped about 5" of rain into the
>> Falling Creek drainage ate into the south bank just below the
>> falls. That exposed a set of massive timbers. Those timbers are
>> seen as part of the 1621-1622 Falling Creek blast furnace building
>> set.
>>
>> Technological background:
>>
>> Iron can be smelted (made) from ores by the direct method. A
>> bloomery makes iron in a structure resembling an overgrown brick
>> 1950's style backyard barbecue. What they get is a bloom of
>> wrought iron that can be whanged by a blacksmith into nails,
>> hinges or whatever a blacksmith wants to and can make. Output is
>> small.
>>
>> The indirect method is a blast furnace. These are giant square
>> stone chimneys that taper slightly as they rise. They may be up to
>> 25' square and up to 25' high. The ironmaster has 3 layers of
>> material. A layer of charcoal, a layer of iron ore and a layer of
>> flux. If the ore is self-fluxing, there is only the charcoal and
>> the ore. The furnace is fed by dumping the charge (charcoal, ore &
>> flux) down into the furnace from the top from the charging bridge.
>> The furnace is first put into blast by lighting charcoal that has
>> partially filled the interior. When it is suitably warm, the
>> layering starts.
>>
>> Blast furnaces are so named because they require a blast of air.
>> This comes from a set of bellows that resembles a standard
>> fireplace bellows, but several orders of magnitude larger. It is
>> powered by a water wheel. The water wheel is fed by a flume, or
>> wooden trough that carried water from the dam to the wheel.
>>
>> Although Falling Creek was deemed a near perfect place for a
>> furnace, it was not ready built. The dam had to be built across
>> the creek. From evidence of post sockets cut into the granite on
>> the two sets of falls there, the dam was moved twice. The flume
>> also appears to have been moved. It also had to cross a large deep
>> hole, and go around a promontory and then empty onto the wheel.
>>
>> The ironmaster will check the contents at the bottom of the
>> furnace. There are typically two arches built into the furnace.
>> One carried the bellows that feeds into a hollow tube called a
>> tuyere that feeds the air directly into the furnace bottom. The
>> blast of air is what makes it all work as a blast furnace. Within
>> the furnace, there has to be a reducing atmosphere. It is a common
>> misperception that all one has to do is heat ore and iron will
>> drip out of it. If one heats iron ore, all one ends up with is hot
>> ore. There is a chemical reaction where the FeO or FeO2 has the O
>> and/or O2 combine with the Carbon and the furnace vents carbon
>> monoxide or carbon dioxide. Then pure Fe can drip into the bottom
>> of the furnace where it is periodically drawn off through a small
>> door in the second arch known as the casting arch.
>>
>> The result of a blast furnace smelting operation is an ingot of
>> iron, commonly called a pig. These are about 3 feet long and 4
>> inches square and weigh up to 75lbs. They are called pigs because
>> the iron is run or tapped out into a large channel cut into sand
>> on the casting floor. From the large channel, the molten iron runs
>> into several smaller channels. Viewed from above, the large
>> channel is seen as a sow pig and the small channels are viewed as
>> suckling pigs, hence the name. A furnace of the early 17th century
>> could produce up to 600 tons of pig iron a year.
>>
>> The pig iron is the sole product of a blast furnace. Just to
>> complicate the issue, it was sometimes a practice to run hot iron
>> directly into molds that produced pots, kettles, frying pans, etc.
>> More commonly, pig iron was shipped to two different types of
>> industrial plants for processing. A foundry produced cast iron
>> products by buying pig from a furnace and re-melting it and
>> running it into molds.
>>
>> A forge, such as Archibald Cary's, bought pig iron from a furnace
>> and put it into a forge that refined it (finery forge). It was
>> slowly fed into a slag bath with the aim of decarburizing the iron
>> farther. When it was suitably done, the resultant iron mass was
>> formed with a very large water powered helve hammer (1200 lbs)
>> into a bar-bell shaped anchony. It was also further mashed into
>> bar iron and rod iron that was then sold to blacksmiths to make
>> enduser products.
>>
>> In the late 18th and into the 19th century, technological
>> innovations changed how iron was made and processed. But for the
>> purposes of discussion about the 17th and 18th century ironworking
>> operations at Falling Creek, the above described process was used.
>>
>> Proof positive that a blast furnace got into operation was dense
>> glassy slag typically dark green or dark blue in color. This
>> material is glass and has been used by glassmakers who bought old
>> furnace slag piles. To date, not one piece of that has been found
>> at Falling Creek.
>>
>> The typical product of a forge is a bubbly slag with charcoal
>> pieces, iron lumps and other materials encased in a silica lump.
>> At the end of the day, each hearth at a forge was emptied. These
>> items are called skulls or mossers because they resemble a human
>> skull. They are discarded. The floodplain at Falling Creek is
>> littered with these.
>>
>> The typical product of a foundry is a denser, ropey or lava
>> appearing lump of slag. Both the foundry and the forge are huge
>> producers of waste products that are trodden into the ground
>> around the operation and are in fact hauled off to build up land
>> from marshy areas.
>>
>> A blast furnace, a foundry and a forge are vastly different
>> technologies. People will tend to use them interchangeably until
>> they are aware. However, to an industrial archaeologist, it is as
>> if someone confused a car with a plane with a boat and used the
>> terms interchangeably. They're all means of transportation but
>> beyond that, they are screamingly different. At Falling Creek,
>> there was a blast furnace in the early 17th century and a forge in
>> the second half of the 18th century. There was no foundry.
>>
>> Background history:
>>
>> The Virginia Company in 1619 sent a fellow named Blewitt with a
>> crew to set up a blast furnace as a money making venture. A small
>> trial of iron had taken place earlier that proved that iron could
>> be made from either the abundant bog ores in the James River basin
>> or from iron ores in rock formation. Blewitt died on the voyage
>> over. It is unknown what, if anything, the rest of the crew did.
>> Then in 1621, John Berkeley and his son Maurice with another crew
>> were sent over to build the blast furnace. They sent a letter back
>> in 1621 that they would have a plentiful supply of pig iron by
>> Whitsuntide (May 14) of 1622. Unfortunately, the Powhatans staged
>> a coup de main on March 22, 1622 that killed all but two children
>> at the site. Maurice escaped as he was elsewhere. There were 3
>> other attempts in the 17th century with no known result. Then in
>> 1750, Archibald Cary started a forge on the property that
>> continued to 1781 when it was burned by Benedict Arnold.
>>
>> It has been known from local stories where the furnace was located
>> generally. And, anyone with technical knowhow would also
>> immediately see where it had to be. Plus, the ground in the area
>> was littered with iron waste. Starting in the 1880's with Brock
>> from the Smithsonia, the site has been investigated. Each
>> investigator pronounced themselves certain that they had seen
>> evidence of the ironworks of 1619-1622. Roland Robbins who dug
>> Saugus Ironworks in Mass. also visited and was also impressed. A
>> succession of folks in the 1950's to the 1990's also visited and
>> were certain they'd found the location. The charcoal pile had been
>> discovered on the south bank and had been radiocarbon dated in the
>> 1990's to the 1570's. The topography fairly screamed out where the
>> furnace had to be located.
>>
>> The problem was that all of those who had come, looked, dug, and
>> pronounced with certainty that they had discovered the ironworks
>> were not technologically literate. What they had seen were pieces
>> of pig iron, slag, charcoal with slag, etc. All of that was part
>> of the Cary forge.
>>
>> The Falling Creek Ironworks Foundation was formed to be a steward
>> of the site by a group of concerned citizens in Chesterfield
>> County. Two archaeologists with a background in industrial
>> archaeology and ironworking were part of the mix. Our job was to
>> provide the technical expertise for the planned excavation.
>> Chesterfield County had acquired the property as a park. Working
>> with the county, the Foundation started the process of planning
>> the events. We knew where the ironworks was located from several
>> pathways. Roger Bensley, in 1937, had uncovered the casting floor
>> apparently during roadbuilding operations and had covered it back
>> over. Due to the overburden of Cary forge slag, flood deposits and
>> the roadway, and in the main due to the absence of furnace slag,
>> the main question was whether the furnace had gotten into blast
>> prior to March 22, 1622. We then did a geophysical survey of the
>> property. Resistance survey showed what appeared to be large
>> buildings on the floodplain. They were consistent with warehouses
>> that Cary had that were burned by Arnold in 1781. Magnetometer
>> survey showed a massive magnetic anomaly consistent with a blast
>> furnace exactly where all and sundry had thought it should be. The
>> mag survey was the first indication that the furnace had gotten
>> into blast. When ground is heated above the blocking temperature
>> (565°C to 675°C), iron atoms in the area above that temperature
>> will align themselves with the earth's magnetic field and when the
>> area cools back down, the atoms are locked into position. Compared
>> with the random orientation of those surrounding areas, the
>> magnetometer detects a large change in the local magnetic field.
>> That massive anomaly proved that the Virginia Company had fired
>> the furnace. So, either the furnace actually got into production
>> for a short period or it was knocked out just as it got into
>> production by the Powhatans.
>>
>> The Physical Remains
>>
>> Several large timbers up to 32"x24"x10'+ were exposed. They appear
>> to form a cribwork which is a rectangular framework that is
>> infilled with stone and clay to make a stable foundation for
>> whatever is to be built on top. There is over 6' depth of cribwork
>> there so it's massive. It is also about 60 feet long stretching
>> down the bank and goes back into the bank for an unknown distance,
>> but not more than 30 feet. One thing a blast furnace cannot have
>> is water in it because it will instantly turn to steam and
>> explode. Thus the ground needs to be prepared properly to hold up
>> the furnace stack, to hold the bellows, axle (treetrunk 2'
>> diameter size) and the water wheel, plus the end of the flume.
>>
>> That appears to be what we have there. Stratified over the
>> cribwork is a set of flood deposits and about 3' above the top of
>> the cribwork is a 4" layer of Cary forge slag. There is absolutely
>> none of that in the timber crib fill. That is an excellent example
>> of stratigraphic separation of the presumed 17th century structure
>> set from the 1750-1781 Cary forge operation.
>>
>> The game plan is to excavate it to see what we do have, remove and
>> preserve the timbers and to put them on display in a museum at the
>> top of the hill. That will require fundraising and a lot of
>> capital to accomplish. We will be actively seeking funds to
>> further the work and to get the museum built.
>>
>>
>> Lyle Browning, RPA
>> Archaeologist
>> Falling Creek Ironworks Foundation
>>
>>
>> On Jan 20, 2007, at 8:03 PM, Sunshine49 wrote:
>>
>>> An article and pictures in today's Richmond Times Dispatch said
>>> the timbers were part of the base for a flume that sent water
>>> through the forge to power it. Since I know nothing much about
>>> ironworking, I have no idea what that means [other than what a
>>> flume is]. It said the newspaper also now has a "multi media
>>> presentation" about the discovery, whatever that entails [multi
>>> media?]. http://www.timesdispatch.com
>>>
>>> Nancy
>>>
>>> -------
>>> I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
>>>
>>> --Daniel Boone
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jan 19, 2007, at 11:42 PM, James Brothers wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ironmasters will meet this year in conjunction with the
>>>>
>>>> 37TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MIDDLE ATLANTIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL
>>>> CONFERENCE
>>>> March 15th-18th, 2007
>>>>
>>>> Cavalier Hotel
>>>>
>>>> Oceanfront at 42nd Street
>>>>
>>>> Virginia Beach, Virginia 23451
>>>>
>>>> Reservations: 1-800-446-8199
>>>>
>>>> or on-line: www.cavalierhotel.com
>>>>
>>>> Ironmasters is a group of archaeologists, historians, and just
>>>> people interested in the history of iron making. This years
>>>> meeting will feature a bloomery smelt at Colonial Williamsburg
>>>> (Saturday) and papers on early iron making. The following
>>>> papers are already scheduled. But there is room for a few more.
>>>> If you are interested please contact me.
>>>>
>>>> Lyle Browning (Browning and Assoc, Ltd.)- Latest information
>>>> from America's first ironworks, Falling Creek (1619-22). Just
>>>> recently massive timbers have appeared as a result of erosion of
>>>> the bank. These are 2-3' below Archibald Cary's Forge (1750-81).
>>>> It is unclear at this time whether these are part of the
>>>> ironwork's warf, dam, or actual structure. But excavation on the
>>>> site should be underway prior to the conference.
>>>>
>>>> Richard Veit (Monmouth Univ,) and Michael J. Gall (Richard Grubb
>>>> and Associates)- Two late 18th century bloomeries in New Jersey,
>>>> Leddell/Frost Forge in Bernardsville and the Mendham Forge in
>>>> Mendham, Morris County. Both date from the late 18th century.
>>>>
>>>> I will be giving a talk updating some of the information on the
>>>> colonial blast furnaces of Virginia.
>>>>
>>>> James Brothers, RPA
>>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>>
>>>> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the
>>>> instructions
>>>> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>>>
>>> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the
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>>> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>>
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>
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