Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
In the Lebanon Valley east of Harrisburg are important iron furnaces,
and here are the "Cornwall Ore Banks," which is one of the greatest
iron-ore deposits in the world--less rich than some others, possibly,
but having a practically exhaustless supply almost alongside these
furnaces. There are three hills of solid iron ore, one of them having
been worked long before the Revolution, the original furnace, still
existing, dating from 1742. This great Cornwall iron mine was bought
in 1737 for $675, including a large tract of land. A half-century
later $42,500 was paid for a one-sixth interest, and to-day a
one-forty-eighth interest is estimated worth upwards of $500,000.
These ores have some sulphur in them, and are therefore baked in ovens
to remove it. They yield about 50 per cent. of iron. A geologist some
time ago reported upon the ore banks that there were thirty millions
of tons of ore in sight above the water-level, being over three times
the amount taken out since the workings began in the eighteenth
century. The deposits extend to a depth of several hundred feet under
the surface, thus indefinitely multiplying the prospective yield.
THE SUSQUEHANNA HEADWATERS.
Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River, is one of the
prettiest lakes in New York State, and is at an elevation of eleven
hundred feet above tide. It is nine miles long and about a mile wide,
the Susquehanna issuing from its southern end at Cooperstown, a hamlet
of two thousand people, beautifully situated amid the high rolling
hills surrounding the lake. The name of the lake comes from the
"Ote-sa-ga rock" at the outlet, a small, round-topped, beehive-shaped
boulder a few rods from the shore, just where the lake condenses into
the river. This was the Indian Council rock, to which they came to
hold meetings and make treaties, and it was well-known among the
Iroquois and the Lenni Lenapes. James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist,
who has immortalized all this region, called the lake the
"Glimmerglass." His father, Judge William Cooper, founded the village
of Cooperstown in 1786, afterwards bringing his infant son from
Burlington, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Here the great
American novelist lived until his death in 1851, his grave, under a
plain horizontal slab, being in the little churchyard of Christ
Episcopal Church. There is a monument to him in Lakewood Cemetery,
about a mile distant, surmounted by a statue of his legendary hunter
"Leatherstocking," who has been described as "a man who had the
simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a
Christian, and the feeling of a poet." The old Cooper mansion, his
home, Otsego Hall, was burnt in 1854, and its site is marked by a rock
in the middle of the road, surrounded by a railing. "Hannah's Hill,"
named after his daughter, and commanding a magnificent view, which he
always described with rapture, is on the western shore of the lake,
just out of town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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