Bog iron and Alanson Hurd

1832 — 1834

The town exists because a swamp rusted: In the low ground south of the river lay deposits of bog iron ore — iron rusted out of the groundwater into the swamp under the hills, in quantities the first reporters thought inexhaustible. Alanson M. Hurd of Detroit heard of the deposits and, in the summer of 1832, sent William Earl to scout them. Earl found a large deposit near the Twin Branches, three miles upriver. Hurd came himself, walked the ground, and made the decision everything else follows from: not the upriver deposit, but the rapids — because the rapids gave water power to work the iron beside the ore that fed it. On January 1, 1833, Hurd bought the 640-acre School Section — Section 16 — at $1.25 an acre, and the works began. Construction of a blast furnace on the south bank commenced in the spring of 1833, before the town was platted, and the furnace was completed in 1834, blown in on bog ore and charcoal, casting kettles and crude iron forms for the pioneer market. The state's marker at the site states the standing of that furnace without hedge: at this site Alanson M. Hurd built the first successful iron blast furnace in Indiana.

The ore body wrote the town's first ending as well as its beginning. The bog under the hills south of the town was rich and shallow, and it was finite: by the time Howard wrote the county history in 1907, 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 water power, and the habit of making things — and those carried Mishawaka long after other fuel and other works replaced its first. The full record of the iron works and its successors belongs to the Business and Industry sections of this record; the Story of Mishawaka section keeps the founding mechanism: ore in the swamp, power in the river, and a promoter who chose the place where the two met.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Earl's scouting (summer 1832), the Twin Branches deposit, Hurd's choice of the rapids, the School Section purchase (January 1, 1833), the furnace ready in early 1834.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X — the furnace commenced the spring before the platting and completed in 1834; the bog ore under the hills south of the town, exhausted by 1907.
3. Howard L. Balsley, "Indiana Iron from Native Ore," Indiana Magazine of History — the St. Joseph blast furnace built from 1833 on the present site of Mishawaka, Hurd its founder, bog ore and charcoal its fuel and charge.
4. Indiana Historical Bureau, historical marker 71.1968.4 — "the first successful iron blast furnace in Indiana."