Business . turally around Pitts-burg, because it was the center of the bituminous coalcountry, and the early iron ore came from the Cornwallmines in Pennsylvania. We have records of ore fromthese famous mines as early as 1740, and in 1786 thelegislature of Pennsylvania lent a Mr. Humphries £300for five years to further his project of making steel asgood as in England. i More than a hundred years after the opening of theCornwall mines, iron was found at the head of the GreatLakes, a thousand miles away. The blast furnaces androlling mills could not move up to the Lake Superiorregion, and, even
Business . turally around Pitts-burg, because it was the center of the bituminous coalcountry, and the early iron ore came from the Cornwallmines in Pennsylvania. We have records of ore fromthese famous mines as early as 1740, and in 1786 thelegislature of Pennsylvania lent a Mr. Humphries £300for five years to further his project of making steel asgood as in England. i More than a hundred years after the opening of theCornwall mines, iron was found at the head of the GreatLakes, a thousand miles away. The blast furnaces androlling mills could not move up to the Lake Superiorregion, and, even had they done so, they would have leftthe coal of Pennsylvania behind. The ore had to bebrought down the lakes to the coal regions. The lakeore seemed, at first, a long way off, and, during the tenyears intervening between the discovery of the Clevelandmines and the Civil War, the shipments never reachedseventy thousand tons in a year. Not until after theintroduction from England of the Bessemer steel-con-. Aftertke painting by KARL biese The Bessemer Process The Story of Steel 219 verter, at the end of the war, the lake ore began to bebrought down in any quantity. By 1870 about one-fourth of the iron ore of the country was being taken outof the Lake Superior mines. The cheapening of the cost of transporting ore from themines at the head of the lakes to the blast furnaces, athousand miles away in Pittsburg, is one of the factorsthat has given this country preeminence in the steelindustry. When we began rolling Bessemer rails, in thelate 60s, it cost more to carry ore from Marquette toOhio than the ore is now sold for. In the old days theore was mined and loaded on cars by human labor, hauledto the docks in small trainloads, put aboard one-thousand-ton sailing vessels by means of wheelbarrows, and im-loaded again by human labor at Ohio ports. Before thefirst Soo canal was dug, the ore had to be rehandledat the Portage, between Lake Superior and Lake Huron,and taken across on a
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