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Thank-you for pointing out the iron smelting history of PA keith.

There is a fair amount of info available on the net and I've enjoyed learning about the subject. I had no idea that iron production on this continent dated that far back.

Meanwhile in the spirit of these steel history threads, I believe I've found the formula for Beretta Steelium.

Fe7NiCr-3He

Steelium.... good grief.


"The price of good shotgunnery is constant practice" - Fred Kimble
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Keith, have a great deer hunt with the flinter. Ive hunted deer and elk for many decades and the only gun Ive had in my hands has been a flintlock rifle. Started shooting muzzleloaders in 57 and never looked back.


When an old man dies a library burns to the ground. (Old African proverb)
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Some great historical information, keith. Thanks from another old m/ler.

SRH


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What I come away with from all of this is... that after walking over all sorts of mysterious artifacts (long-abandoned roads, intricate stone walls, cast iron pipes, etc.) in the woods of my youth I finally have some sense of what has happened there before my time. It is quite common there to see the artifacts of the early oilfields (wellheads, wooden tanks, bull-wheels and rod-lines) and even the last couple of timber harvests, but these remnants of clearly very-heavy industry were puzzling to me, but no-more. Nice to be able to finally put all those pieces together. My grandfather (born in 1904) used to talk about "bog ore" that he loaded on rail-cars in his very early youth. As you go along the areas near to some of these furnaces you'll see clearly excavated and long-abandoned low spots that didn't make any sense until now. Railroad lines all over that region track through some hard to understand low spots (my training is in geology, and these things weren't "natural"). Now...clearly some of them were borrow-pits used to build the nearby grade for the line or for trestles over low spots or streams, but the rest were pretty mysterious to me. Now, at least I have a plausible explanation for them.

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Probably some 30-35 miles from where I live iron was formerly smelted in the area around a small town known as Tracy City, TN. They fired their furnaces with coke. A large number of the coke ovens are still there, & I suspect some of the furnaces as well, though I am not overly familiar with the area. Over the years I have worked with several people from there & have seen a few of the od coke ovens.

Lloyd, that Miller girl you dated may well have been a distant relative of mine. Though Miller is my middle name it was derived from my Great Grandmother's maiden name, one Nanny Miller. Yes, Nanny was her Name, she died before becoming a grandmother. Her ancestors had moved from Penn during the "Whiskey Rebellion, & eventually settled in Rutherford County TN & a small town grew up around them known as Millersburg. She married my G Grandfather, Samuel Black Bigham. Their son, my Grandfather (Papa) was named Miller Bigham but later added an N & became Miller Bingham.


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Mr. Miller: Sadly, I never dated any of the Miller girls from that part of the world, but I believe her little brother bought my paternal Grandfather's home after he passed in '93. There was a pig-iron ingot on the floor of his garage that he used as a stopping-block for his cars. I'm sorry now that I never asked him about it (didn't even realize what it was until after all this discussion). I'll bet it's still there. The Whiskey Rebellion caused the Scots-Irish of my early world to relocate all the way to Texas from what I understand. There was a series a few (many?) years ago titled "the History of English" that tracked the unique brand of "English" spoken from that time all across the intermountain regions of Appalachia. Tennessee was clearly the recipient of some of those exiles. I knew about the history of the Region during the French & Indian Wars (lots of English pennies and arrowheads were found in a freshly plowed field near Big Sandy creek there for years. Ever hear of "Murdering Town"? Rugged county in those days.

Last edited by Lloyd3; 01/18/20 08:07 PM.
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Sorry, Lloyd;
I went back & re-read your post & you said you went to grade school with one of the Miller Girls. By the time I got to the 2nd page here I got mixed up & was thinking you had said you dated her. Thanks for the history. I have always assumed my Miller ancestors were German, but that may not be the case. Some years back though an article in the American Rifleman written by a serviceman who had hunted in Germany had a picture of a Forrestor who could have passed for a twin to one of my Mothers Brothers.


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No worries Mr. Miller, most of the Millers I have encountered over the years are your usual mix of Brit... plus Irish, German, Scots. etc. To some degree we're all Heinz 57 now. The melting pot actually does seem to work after a fashion.

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Thanks for the wishes for a good flintlock deer hunt. I'm afraid my freezer won't have venison until next year, but it was great to be out there, and I saw things that made it seem like a very successful hunt. On Friday, I decided to go to the area around Freedom Falls and the Rockland Furnace which was built in 1832. I found it pretty easily, and the area was open to hunting. I took a number of photos with my phone, and will post some as soon as I dump them into the computer. The scenery was gorgeous.

Unlike the Webster Furnace I posted a pic of, The Rockland Furnace is more intact, and someone has taken the time to clear away brush and to cut down a number of small trees growing out of it. This is wonderful, because those roots would eventually push the cut stones apart and topple the furnace. The Mill Race and Wheel Pit are largely intact, and you could see into the bosh and up the flue. I still can't imagine how they managed to build and operate these things. While not nearly as large as the Pyramids of Egypt or other ancient ruins, a number of the cut stones are large enough to break the leaf springs and blow the tires of my pickup truck. And all they had was wooden wagons and stone boats pulled by draft horses.

Like Lloyd says, learning more about these furnaces answers a lot of questions, but it makes me think of many more. How did they move these stones? How did they cut them without steel chisels or carbide or diamond saws? There is no shortage of rocks in the Rockland area, with many glacial boulders bigger than a large house. When they transported the pig iron down the Allegheny River to sell it in Pittsburgh, how did they get back home, going upstream against the current? They sure didn't fire up the Evinrude because gasoline engines hadn't been invented yet.

Another great website I found is this one... and it also has info on early lead shot towers if you navigate from their home page:

https://www.oldindustry.org/iron.html


A true sign of mental illness is any gun owner who would vote for an Anti-Gunner like Joe Biden.

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Cool history. Looking forward to the pictures.

Best,
Ted

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