Except for bloomeries, which could have existed in every colony, the first successful ironworks in British America began production about 1645 at Saugus, Massachusetts. (In a bloomery operation a lump of iron ore—usually bog iron—is heated until it is semimolten, and then is hammered on the anvil until most impurities have been forced out; with much labor in this manner, small quantities of excellent wrought iron can be produced.) The Saugus works have been reconstructed after careful archaeological and historical research; a sort of family resemblance is to be presumed between them and the ironworks built in Virginia early in the eighteenth century.

Governor Alexander Spotswood re-launched the iron industry in Virginia with the financial backing of several gentlemen in the colony and in England, and with the skilled labor of immigrant ironworkers from Germany. By 1718 it appears that his Tubal works, near the confluence of the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers, were in production, although he had not yet received the London government’s permission even to start the project.

Fourteen years later Spotswood (by then out of office) told William Byrd II of Westover that iron mines and blast furnaces were operating at four locations in Virginia. Byrd visited and described those at Tubal, not far from Germanna, at Fredericksville, and at Massaponax (now called New Post) below Fredericksburg. Spotswood had an interest in the second, and was sole proprietor of the first and third, having bought out his original backers.

The fourth was at Accokeek, near the Potomac, on land belonging to Augustine Washington, whose son George had just been born. Byrd, who did not get that far on his 1732 “Progress to the Mines,” nevertheless confidently reported that “Matters are very well managed there, and no expense is spared to make them profitable, which is not the case in the works I have already mentioned.” This judgment may have been accurate for all we know, but it seems unkind of Byrd to throw the only bouquet to the one place he had not seen while dropping brickbats on the men who had been so hospitable and helpful to him.

His criticism was certainly well founded in one case. The furnace at Fredericksville (a place no longer on the map) had been idle the entire summer. Somewhat like the rider who was lost for want of a horseshoe nail, here the blast furnace could not operate even though ore, limestone, charcoal, waterpower, and skilled labor were all available. The missing “nail” in this case was corn. There was not enough to feed the oxen that hauled the carts that carried the ore from mine to furnace and the sows from furnace to dockside on the Rappahannock some twenty-four miles away.

Byrd, who had a notion to become an ironmaster himself, was advised that a proper works required, besides an iron deposit nearby, a constant supply of waterpower to operate the bellows, easy access to deep water for shipping the output to England, at least two miles square of woodland to supply charcoal for a “moderate” furnace, and 120 slaves to do the work, including some to grow food for both men and beasts. Two bits of advice, which he recorded as follows, may have dissuaded him from taking the plunge:

If all these circumstances happily concur, and you could procure honest colliers and firemen, which will be difficult to do....

The founders find it very hot work to tend the furnace, especially in summer, and are obliged to spend no small part of their earnings in strong drink to recruit their spirits.

Spotswood’s Tubal works were producing, in 1723, castiron “backs and frames for Chymmes [chimneys], Potts, doggs, frying, stewing and baking pans.” But even at the time of Byrd’s trip, the output of the four Virginia furnaces consisted almost entirely of cast iron sows and pigs that were shipped to England. There was not a single forge operating in the whole of Virginia, Spotswood told Byrd.

Just three years later, however, Governor William Gooch reported to the Board of Trade in London that one forge was producing bar iron. He seemed to think this was enough to satisfy the colony’s needs for iron “for agriculture and Planting, for mending as well as making tools.” How badly Gooch misjudged the local demand for wrought iron is evident in the rapid increase of forges in the following years. A number sprang up near the lower Potomac and in the Shenandoah Valley; one, called Holt’s Forge, was erected sometime before 1755 between Williamsburg and Richmond at what is now Providence Forge. Its output just before the Revolution included bar iron and such plantation supplies as plow hoes, broad hoes, hilling hoes, grubbing hoes with steel edges, nails, and axes.

Legally, no colonial forge with trip hammer, rolling mill to fashion wrought iron plate, or slitting mill to turn the plate into bars could be built after Parliament passed the Iron Act of 1750. But the law seems to have had little effect, and Virginia smiths called for more and more bar iron to make farm tools and ironwork for wagons, mills, and ships.

The demand was so great that most bar iron produced in the colonies was consumed by local blacksmiths. In 1764, for example, Colonel John Tayloe, who owned ironworks in King George County, found he could sell his whole output locally. Robert Carter, the planter-entrepreneur of Nomini Hall and partner in the Baltimore iron Works, sold large quantities of bar iron in Williamsburg and to blacksmiths elsewhere in Virginia.

By 1770 William Hunter’s works at Falmouth, said to be the largest in America at that time, were turning one and one-half tons of pig iron into bars every day. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson, who had a small interest in three blast furnaces in his home county of Albermarle and who later owned a nail making machine and sold its output, counted eight ironworks in Virginia. He reported that they produced about 4,400 tons of pig iron and more than 900 tons of bar iron annually.