The iron system: ore, charcoal, and water

1832–1845 AND THE ORE'S END

The first industrial system here was a triangle, and each side of it was local: In the low ground south of the river lay bog iron — iron rusted out of the groundwater into the swamp under the hills. Alanson M. Hurd of Detroit sent William Earl to scout the deposits in the summer of 1832; Earl found a large deposit near the Twin Branches, three miles upriver. Hurd came, walked the ground, and chose otherwise: not the upriver deposit but the rapids, because the rapids gave water power to work the iron beside the country that fed it. On 1 January 1833 he bought the 640-acre School Section at $1.25 an acre, and in the spring of 1833 the blast furnace rose on the south bank — completed and blown in in 1834, the first successful iron blast furnace in Indiana, on the state's marker at the site. The system's inputs stood within a walk of the furnace stack: bog ore from the swamps under the southern hills, charcoal from the heavy timber of Penn and Madison townships — timber the pioneer George Merrifield, quoted in the city's history, called an "inexhaustible resource" without which "much of our prosperity would have been an impossibility" — and water power from the dam and races to drive the blast and the works. The system's reach was not local at all. The city's history records the iron going out to a regional market from the first year: orders came "from as far north as the Grand River in Michigan and as far south as Indianapolis," most of the iron going to castings — stoves, kettles, plows, and gears for mills. And the decade the system ran at full strength carries the largest industrial claim in this record, printed as its carrier gives it: historian Merle Blue's judgment, carried in the city's commissioned history, that from 1835 to 1845 "Mishawaka was the largest center of heavy industry, not just in St. Joseph County, but in the entire Great Lakes area west of Detroit." The claim is Blue's, quoted by the city history; what stands behind it in the record reached is the furnace, the dam, the races and the mills that lined them, in a town whose own count in 1838 was 756 people. The triangle's weak side was the ore. The bog under the hills was rich, shallow, and finite, and Howard, writing in 1907, closes its account in one sentence: the iron ore "has all been taken from the bog where it was once thought to be inexhaustible." The iron age of Mishawaka ran on a deposit measured in decades. What outlasted it was everything the furnace had called into being — the town, the dam, the races, the plat, the habit of making things — and the entries below are the record of those assets being handed, trade by trade, to works that burned coal and crude rubber instead of charcoal and bog ore. The furnace's own course, and the iron companies that succeeded it on the ground, are profiled in the Story of Mishawaka section and Businesses sections; what belongs here is the system: ore in the swamp, timber on the hills, power in the river, and a promoter who chose the one place where all three met.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history, City of Mishawaka) — Earl's scouting and the Twin Branches deposit; Hurd's choice of the rapids; the School Section purchase of 1 January 1833; the furnace ready in early 1834; the iron's market from the Grand River to Indianapolis and its casting uses; Merrifield on the timber; and Merle Blue's judgment on the town's standing, 1835–1845, quoted as the city history quotes it.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X — the bog ore under the hills south of the town, exhausted by 1907.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1968.4 — the furnace at the rapids as the first successful iron blast furnace in Indiana.
4. This build's Spine and Businesses sections — the iron works' founding and corporate course, cross-referenced and not retold.