Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
Shipbuilding and the saw-mill had early sprung from the domestic
necessities of the people. The Dutch had made the windmill a striking
feature in the landscape of New York. The people of Pennsylvania had
been the earliest in the middle colonies to establish a press, and it
had brought the paper-mill in its train, though after a long interval;
for it was not till 1697 that the manufacture of paper began near
Philadelphia, and not till thirty years later (1728) was the second
mill established at Elizabethtown in New Jersey. The Dutch had begun
the making of glass in New York city, near what is now Hanover Square,
and in Philadelphia it was becoming an industry as early as 1683;
though if one may judge from the use of oiled paper in the first houses
of Germantown, the manufacture of window-glass began later. Wistar,
a palatine, erected a glass-house near Salem, in West New Jersey, in
1740, and Governor Moore, of New York, in 1767, says of a bankrupt
glass-maker in New York that his ill success had come of his imported
workmen deserting him after he had brought them over from Europe at
great cost.
The presence of iron ore in the hills along the Hudson had been known
to the Dutch, but they had made no attempt to work the mines, relying
probably to some extent upon Massachusetts, where “a good store of
iron” was manufactured from an early date. Towards the end of the
seventeenth century, when the ore was tried, the founders discovered
the iron to be too brittle to encourage its use. Lieutenant-Governor
Clarke tried to arouse interest for the iron industry in 1737,
and induced the general assembly to consider the advisability of
encouraging proprietors of iron-works; but the movement came to
nothing, and Parliament did what it could to thwart all such purposes
by enacting a law “to encourage the importation of pig and bar iron
from his Majesty’s Colonies in America, and to prevent the erection
of any Mill or other Engine for Slitting or Rolling of Iron; or any
plating Forge to work with a Tilt Hammer; or any Furnace for making
Steel in any of the said Colonies.” When this act was passed in 1750
only a single plating-forge existed in the province of New York, at
Wawayanda, Orange County, which had been built about 1745, and was
not in use at the time. Two furnaces and several blomaries had been
established about the same time in the manor of Cortland, Westchester
County, but a few years had sufficed to bring their business to a
disastrous end.
In 1757 the province could show only one iron-work at Ancram, which
produced nothing but pig and bar iron. At this same establishment,
owned by the Livingstons, in the present Columbia County, many a cannon
was cast some years later to help in the defence of American liberties.
In 1766 we find a little foundry established in New York for making
small iron pots, but its operations had not yet become very extensive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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