The first iron-works in New Jersey seem to have been opened by an Englishman, James Grover, who had become dissatisfied with the rule of the Dutch and the West India Company, and had removed from Long Island to Shrewsbury, New Jersey, where he and some iron-workers from Massachusetts set up one of the first forges in the province. In 1676 the Morris family, which later became so prominent in colonial politics, was granted a large tract of land near the Raritan River, with the right “to dig, delve, and carry away all such mines for iron as they shall find” in that tract. The smelting-furnace and forge mentioned in an account of the province by the proprietors of East New Jersey, in 1682, employing both whites and blacks, was probably on the Morris estate. The mineral treasures of the province, however, remained on the whole undiscovered at the end of the century; but in the following century several blomary forges and one charcoal-furnace were erected in Warren County, the latter of which was still running twenty-five years ago. Penn had early learned of the richness of his province in iron and copper, though no attempt was made to mine them till 1698. At this early period Gabriel Thomas mentions the discovery of mineral ores, which were probably found in the Chester County of that day, and the first iron-works in the province were built in that region. Governor Keith owned iron-works in New Castle County (Delaware) between 1720 and 1730, and had such good opinion of the iron industry in the colonies that he considered them capable of supplying, if sufficiently encouraged, the mother country with all the pig and bar iron needed. In 1718 we read of iron-works forty miles up the Schuylkill River, probably the Coventry forge, on French Creek, in Chester County; also of a forge in Berks or Montgomery County, which in 1728 became the scene of an Indian attack. The mineral wealth of Lancaster County soon attracted the attention of the thrifty Germans who had settled there. In 1728 this county had two or more furnaces in blast, and the number of them in the province increased rapidly up to the time of the Revolution. Upon the Delaware, the Dutch and Swedes seem to have neglected the ores of silver, copper, iron, and other minerals, which they did not fail to discover existed in that region; but an Englishman, Charles Pickering, who lived in Charlestown, Chester County, Pennsylvania, appears to have been the earliest to mine copper, and was on trial in 1683 on the charge of uttering base coin. A letter written by Governor Morris, of New Jersey, to Thomas Penn in 1755, speaks of a copper-mine at the Gap in Lancaster County, which had been discovered twenty years previous by a German miner.