A Landscape Transformed

Fluctuations in the national economy buffeted the Salisbury iron industry, but choices Salisbury’s own ironmakers made about metallurgical technique determined both its course and its demands on the environment. A year-by-year count of the number of Salisbury forges and furnaces shows the rise and decline of the district’s ironmaking, modulated by fluctuations in the national (or, earlier, colonial) economy. The district’s bloomery forges made the wrought-iron products most wanted in the early eighteenth century. Because of the limited demand for castings (as well as the large investment required), a single blast furnace sufficed in the district until 1810. By then, the Salisbury ironmakers had entered the market for high-quality wrought iron made by the indirect process and needed to enlarge the supply of pig iron for the new finery forges that began to supplant the old bloomeries. Local entrepreneurs added two new furnaces. By 1848, sixteen furnaces met the demand for pig from the additional finery forges built from 1825 through 1833, together with the requirements of the new puddling works. The smaller furnaces that specialized in making forge pig lost their market as the fineries, followed by the puddling works, closed in the 1850s. The remaining furnaces, making pig iron for foundries that specialized in chilled-iron railroad wheels, carried on until the railroads’ adoption of steel wheels curtailed this market in the twentieth century. The national ebb and flow of business, along with disruptions caused by war, modulated the trends established by the techniques the Salisbury ironmasters chose and the types of products they sold. Investment in bloomeries accelerated during the colonial prosperity of the 1740s and slowed during the wars with the French and the Revolution. Return of settled times in the early Republic led many individuals and partnerships to build bloomery forges in the years up to 1807 and to invest in furnaces and finery forges. Hard times after the War of 1812 suspended new investment. The period of the district’s greatest growth fell in the economic expansion from 1824 through 1837, when New England entrepreneurs made rapid progress in developing the American system of manufactures based on interchangeable parts and power-driven machine tools.