to assist the Spaniards, or Mexicans as they had by then become, into mining the veins. But though the evidence of gold in the region was patchy there was more substance to the belief that the region was prospective for copper, as stories abounded of copper items being found in the possession of indigenous Indians.
New Mexico copper
One of the more substantial copper mines established in New Mexico was a mine at Santa Rita in the late 18th century. Over the years this mine was owned by Mexicans, Americans and even Frenchmen, the ownership regularly passing into new hands as the opposition to the operation, often violent, of local Apaches, which only ceased in the 1880s following the establishment of Apache reservations, rose and fell. By the start of the 20th century the ownership of the Santa Rita copper leases had passed through Anaconda Copper into the hands of Chino Copper, and the operating mine was now the El Chino open pit, which was taken over by Kennecott in 1933 where it remained until acquired by Phelps Dodge in 1986. El Chino still operates today and it is estimated that since the start of production in 1801 the mines developed around Santa Rita have produced $2 billion in value of copper and precious metal by-products.
Sadly this period of time was hardly a glorious one for the Mexican and American adventurers who penetrated the southwest in terms of their dealings with the Indians. Not only were the Indians usually reluctant to help the incomers over their mining needs, they resented the exploitation of raw materials from lands that they claimed were theirs, as we have seen above with the Santa Rita mine. Jesuit missionaries in Texas did not help foster relations with the indigenous Indians either and they were expelled by the Spanish crown in 1767, partly to encourage the Indians to help mine the rich silver lodes found in the area.
Searching for gold and finding base metals
As with Latin America, the lure of North America for many explorers was the possibility of finding precious metals, but in this respect they were largely unlucky as in due course we know that gold was found out west, and in the east it was found over the Canadian border in central Ontario and in Quebec. It was copper that unsurprisingly kept on turning up – in Connecticut in 1707, in New Jersey in 1719 and again in New Jersey in 1750.
In colonial times metal discovered in the American colonies was usually shipped back to the UK if it needed smelting, which made for sometimes unpredictable economics. After independence one of the earlier copper mining and smelting complexes was established in Vermont in 1820 and in 1853 the Vermont Copper Mining Company was incorporated. It became one of the primary sources of copper for American users until the discoveries in Michigan set off a string of major discoveries across the Midwest, which we will come to later.
Iron ore
As well as copper there were early discoveries of iron ore, the first being in North Carolina in 1585 by Thomas Heriot, who was on an expedition dispatched to the New World by Sir Walter Raleigh. The iron ore was useful to the growing colonies as their blacksmiths needed it to make tools and nails for construction. A small shipment of ore was sent back to England from Virginia in 1608 as ballast and was smelted in Bristol. A few years later an attempt was made to establish ironworks in Virginia for the manufacture of tools on a significant scale but local Indians destroyed the works established near Jamestown.
During the 17th century iron ore was found in a number of locations in the colonies – Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Kentucky – and ironworks were established. One of the first was at Lynn, Massachusetts, built by John Winthrop Jr. who formed the Undertakers for the Iron-works Company in 1643. One environmental issue that had already raised concern in England with the growing iron industry was the rapid denuding of woodland to provide charcoal for the smelting process. The age of coal was about to begin, and so it was in the colonies as the cutting down of forests became equally unpopular.
The American colonies were settled with agriculture as their main economic activity, which perhaps explains why for many years the development of industrial enterprises, like ironworks, lagged behind Europe in technological terms, particularly behind the old country, as the Industrial Revolution loomed, and this continued beyond the achievement of independence.
In the early 18th century American iron making was based on blooms – wrought iron lumps – which could be beaten into implements on blacksmiths’ forges. Cast iron working followed but operating problems due to the lack of waterpower in the summer meant that continuous working had to await the arrival of steam power at the start of the 19th century. There was also the problem that the British government sought to control iron production and encourage the export of iron ore to England for smelting; with American independence that practice ended.
The first iron ore used in Massachusetts came from bog ore – ore that had accumulated in ground hollows which had often then become ponds or small lakes. In due course larger accumulations of haematite and magnetic ores were discovered. At the end of the War of Independence every US state had some form of ironworks, although in terms of production they were still small and weekly output from each works was little more than 25 tonnes, an insignificant level compared to output in Europe. A century later the US was producing as much steel as Great Britain, Germany and France put together as huge iron ore and coal deposits in the Midwest were discovered and developed.
John Winthrop Jr. (1606-1676)
John Winthrop Jr. was born in Suffolk in England, the son of John Winthrop who eventually became the Governor of Massachusetts. Winthrop Jr. was educated at Bury St Edmond’s Grammar School and then at Trinity College, Dublin. On leaving Dublin he studied law in London for a short time in 1624, but then became something of an adventurer in the 1620s, joining the Duke of Buckingham’s unsuccessful expedition to release the beleaguered Huguenots in La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast. Thereafter he travelled around the Mediterranean.
On his return to England in 1629 he found his father had been appointed Governor of Massachusetts in the New World. Winthrop Jr. remained in England to look after his stepmother and siblings, and his father’s business affairs. In 1631 he followed his father to America with the family and founded the town of Ipswich in Massachusetts, but was then encouraged by his father and interests in London to take up the position of Governor of Connecticut which led to his return to London to obtain patents from the Crown for the establishment of the colony of Connecticut.
He succeeded in obtaining the Crown’s permission to establish the colony and on his return to America he became excited by the potential for minerals in both Connecticut and Massachusetts. He spent time in Massachusetts in the late 1630s persuading the primarily agrarian inhabitants of the colony to take an interest in developing the mineral potential of the area. Winthrop Jr. established two ironworks in Massachusetts, at Braintree in 1644, the first in the American Colonies, and then a bigger one at Lynn, both using locally mined bog iron. He then went back to Connecticut and continued his new role as a mining and metals entrepreneur building ironworks at North Branford. He also established a granite quarry on his land at Waterford on the Connecticut coast. Winthrop Jr. was known as America’s first commercial iron maker, and due to his efforts Connecticut earned the title cradle of American mining.
But Winthrop Jr. was much more than a political figure and mining developer; he was a man of science also and very interested in alchemy. This interest meant he was curiously in demand over matters of witchcraft, something of an obsession in colonial New England. In the latter years of his life he spent a lot of time fulfilling the duties of Governor of Connecticut and in 1675 he became one of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, which merged Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London and contributed a paper on maize, another area of his expertise as he owned and operated a grist mill in New London, Connecticut, where he had a monopoly over the milling of maize.
Winthrop Jr. married a cousin, Mary Fones, in 1631 and she accompanied him and the other Winthrops to Massachusetts in 1633. Unfortunately Mary and their baby daughter died in the following year. The tragedy temporarily saw him back in England where he met and married his second wife, Elizabeth Reade, in 1635. They had nine children,