USA > Missouri > Missouri the center state, 1821-1915 > Part 29
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Joseph Pratte died and the grant remained in the possession of his heirs for nearly half a century. Then James Harrison and Conrad C. Ziegler made an examination of the mountain and began to pick up the interests of the various heirs. In 1845 they had obtained control and formed the American Iron Moun- tain Company, with the following members: James Harrison, Conrad C. Ziegler, August Belmont, Evariste F. Pratte, John Scott, Felix Valle, Samuel Ward and Charles F. Mersch. Ziegler was a Ste. Genevieve capitalist and conducted nego- tiations with the Pratte heirs. Ward was a glass manufacturer. Mersch was a wealthy German. Belmont was the New York representative of foreign capital and handled the Rothschilds' investments in this country. John Scott was the first Congressman from Missouri. He was a resident of Ste. Genevieve. Felix Valle was greatly interested in various mining enterprises in Southeast Missouri.
The company began operations soon after getting control of the property. Harrison was the president and the brains of the enterprise. He even took the active management for a time. There was no railroad. The only outlet to market was by wagon eastward forty miles or so to the river. About midway between the mountain and the river, near Farmington, furnaces were built for the reduction of the ore, and these were operated for many years under the name of Valley Forge. But the forge was a part of the Iron Mountain enterprise. The ore was loaded upon wagons, hauled to the forge, there converted into blooms, and thence transported to the river to be distributed throughout the Mis- sissippi Valley. To expedite the business a plank road was built, and the traveler twenty-five years ago encountered at two or three places on "the pike" the long bar which was lifted only when he had paid the regulation toll. This was the last relic of the toll-gate system in Missouri. The forge was located near Farm- ington for the reason that wood was plenty in the vicinity. Fuel-getting in the early days of iron making was a problem even more vexing than the transporta- tion question. Vast quantities of charcoal were used in the furnaces. To keep up the supply the company bought tracts of land solely to acquire the timber on them. This accounted for the possession at one time of 32,000 acres, nearly double the amount conveyed by the Pratte grant. The grant with its 20,000 arpents lay in one body. The other tracts were scattered over a stretch of country thirty miles long and a dozen miles wide.
Wagoning iron ore and blooms proved too slow and too costly. But even with that method of transportation, President Harrison made such a showing of enterprise that capital was tempted to build a railroad to him. The Iron Mountain
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road was the result. Its construction was prompted and encouraged by the prospect of ore and iron carrying. It reached Pilot Knob, five miles below Iron Mountain, in 1858, and that remained the terminus until after the Civil war.
The Iron Mountain Policy.
President Harrison's faith in the Iron Mountain enterprise never wavered. But that is more than can be said of some of the others who went in with him at the beginning. Belmont dropped out when the early dividends failed to reach expectations. Valle held his interest and acquired more. Pierre Chouteau, Jr., transferred a portion of his fur-trading capital to the Iron Mountain enterprise. After a time the whole property was held by members of three families-Chou- teau, Harrison and Valle. For twenty years the profits were comparatively small. First the company had to wait for the railroad, and after that came the war, preventing anything like continuous working. At times two or three regi- ments of soldiers were camped at the mountain. But President Harrison stead- ily pursued the policy with which he had started. He got out ore and made iron right along. When the market was dull he stacked up his ore and his iron and let the product stand. The company had no debt. There were no fixed charges to meet. When no sales were made no dividends were declared. When a period of activity came, part of the money realized from profits was promptly divided and part was held as surplus to continue work. This was President Harrison's policy, and it was the policy to the end. Work went on at the mountain even when there wasn't a dozen car loads a day shipped off. The iron market had its alternate periods of activity and depression. When the demand developed the accumulated product at the mountain was shoved upon the market as rapidly as cars could be obtained.
One of these periods of activity came about 1866 and 1867. Stock had been accumulating all through the war period. The company was prepared to ship faster than cars could be had. From 100 to 120 cars left the mountain daily. There were 1,500 men on the pay rolls. Money was made faster than ever known before in iron mining in this country. This great run on the mountain lasted, with but little decline, until the Jay Cooke failure and panic in 1873. For the five years from 1867 to 1872 the profits on the Iron Mountain output were more than $1,000,000 a year. They went into the hands of representatives of the three families. In 1869, as the charter was expiring, the company reorgan- ized, dropping from the title the word American. The corporation became the Iron Mountain Company, the members being James Harrison, Mrs. Julia Maffit, Charles P. Chouteau, Felix Valle, Jules Valle and Henry Belin. The holders of the stock were so few that it was necessary to transfer a few shares in order to get the requisite number of qualified stockholders to form a board. Mrs. Maffit was the sister of Charles P. Chouteau; they inherited their Iron Mountain inter- est from their father, Pierre Chouteau, Jr. Between 1880 and 1890 there were more stockholders than there had been at any previous time. The Rozier brothers were largely interested through their wives, who were the Misses Valle. Charles C. Maffit, the son of Mrs. Julia Maffit, held a considerable portion of the Iron Mountain stock his grandfather bought forty years earlier, and became the presi- dent of the company. The interest of James Harrison, the founder of the com-
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pany, passed to his son, Edwin Harrison. It was the largest single holding in the company.
Early operations were primitive. The ore was picked from the crest of the mountain in chunks, trundled down the mountain side on tramways, and loaded on the cars ready for shipment. Pick and shovel dislodged the masses. Gravity furnished the power, for the loaded car going down pulled the empty one up. That was picking up dollars. One workman was good for six or eight tons a day. Ore was worth nine and ten dollars a ton, and 100 cars a day left the mountain for the furnaces. There were periods when the shipments went over 1,000 tons a day, and every ton meant a five-dollar bill to the stockholders. A net income of $5,000 a day !
"Um! Um!" said old Tom Dwyer, "but them was the days when the mountain made money."
The Passing of Iron Mountain.
The cap of the mountain was taken off and then the core was excavated. The visitor stood on what looked like the edge of a crater and gazed down on the net- work of tramways and inclines and saw the stalwart miners following the veins downward so far away they looked like small boys. One of these veins was twenty-five feet thick and of pure ore-so pure that it seemed probable it was the vein through which the molten ore found its way upward to the summit of the mountain. This vein lay perpendicular. It was, to all appearances, the mother vein of Iron Mountain. In the other veins and deposits there was more or less dirt or rock mixed with the ore, and the product from them was put through an elaborate process before it was ready to ship. First it was hauled out, heaped up and "hydraulicked." Up the valley there was a massive stone dam which caught the waters of Indian Creek and formed a lake large enough to furnish good fishing the year round and a big crop of ice in winter. The water from this lake was pumped to the top of the neighboring mountain and there kept in a con- crete tank which held 700,000 gallons. The rocky summit made excavation impos- sible, and the concrete walls were built fourteen feet above the surface. From this tank, pipes led down the mountain side, across the valley and to all parts of Iron Mountain. This water, with a pressure of from twenty-five to forty pounds, was turned on the ore piles until all the dirt that could be washed away was car- ried off. Then the ore went to the separator to be rolled and rattled and shaken over screens and jigs. At every stage in this process some ore, being heavier than the rock, dropped out until finally the tailings contained only a small per cent of mineral. The product of the mine lost fifteen per cent of its weight in the washing process and twenty per cent in the separator. But the process paid. One man with his stationary hose could "hydraulic" a thousand tons a week, and the separator did its work as rapidly as the carts could unload into the mouth of the revolving funnel. Iron manufacturers liked their ore cleaned. It saved the cost of reducing clay and rock along with the metal. Some of the ore came from the separator in pieces the size of macadam, and some was as small as grains of corn. There were five sizes, but they all were mixed together for the market, and they graded from sixty to sixty-five per cent iron.
Iron Mountain was one of the natural wonders of the world. For two gen- erations scientific men came to see and marvel and speculate on the origin. Every
CHARLES P. CHOUTEAU
PIERRE CHOUTEAU, JR.
EXCAVATION OF ORE AT IRON MOUNTAIN BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
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week there was at least one arrival. The hotel register read like the front part of a college catalogue or the roll of an academy of science. The treatment of these visitors was another of the peculiar things about the Iron Mountain manage- ment. The latch-string was always on the outside. Not only were the mines open to inspection, but from the superintendent down there seemed to be a tacit understanding that all information possible should be cheerfully furnished. In short, if there was such a thing as soul in a corporation, the Iron Mountain Com- pany had one.
Underground mining gradually took the place of open work at the Iron Mountain. For some years there was nothing to do but to pick up the ore in chunks as it lay piled on the crest of the mountain. This formation was forty feet thick in places. When the chunks had been cleared away, then came veins of all sizes and extending in all directions. Some of them curved and twisted into the most fantastic forms. Some were almost perpendicular; some were almost horizontal. Theory accounted for the layer of chunks on the surface by the supposition that at some time there was an upheaval and the molten ore spouted into the air to a considerable height and fell back to be broken and scat- tered about over the mountain top. The same theory supposed that when the upheaval came, lifting the porphyry and limestone and sandstone, the molten ore poured through the broken masses and filled innumerable crevices; and thus the bewildering confusion of ore veins and deposits was accounted for.
Scientists had to construct theories for the Iron Mountain alone. Conditions there had no parallels anywhere else. But it must be admitted that the gentle- men were equal to the demand upon their theorizing powers. They came, wan- dered over the mountain and gazed at the formations through their spectacles. They sat on the gallery of the comfortable Iron Mountain hotel, while the evening breezes played, and told Superintendent Pilley how it all came about. To be sure, the theories varied a great deal. One man thought the formation was aqueous ; that the upheaval took place when these mountain tops were covered with water. Another was just as sure the molten ore spouted up after the water receded. Mr. Pilley listened. The professor who had spent two days there knew ten times as much about Iron Mountain as the superintendent, who had been there a quarter of a century, did. That is, if the hearer might judge from the emphatic assertions of one and the guarded expression of the other. But the superintendent had learned by long experience that nothing was certain at Iron Mountain except the existence of ore. He knew what he saw, and that was enough.
After the surface chunks were removed, the veins and deposits were followed down, some of them a hundred feet and more. There used to be a Little Moun- tain. It was in the nature of a western annex, for there was a depression between the two summits. Little Mountain became a great hole in the ground. It had a thick vein, which dipped at an angle of thirty-eight degrees. This vein was worked as an open cut, until all that was left of Little Mountain was the hole. The vein was followed to a depth of 280 feet. For a long time the ore was hauled up to the edge of the cavity and then run down the outer side to the rail- road track. This became too long a haul. A shaft was sunk at the base of Little Mountain, and ore was taken out by underground passages.
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The Hope of St. Louis in 1854.
The greatest of St. Louis' expectations, in 1854, was manufacture of iron. At the gates of the city was the coal. Near by and in forms for working almost without parallel in facility were ore bodies thought to be practically inexhaustible. Why should not St. Louis become another Workshop of the World? The fur trade was losing its glamor. There were mistaken forebodings that the lead deposits of counties contiguous to St. Louis were being worked out. To the field of iron manufacture the Garrisons and other captains of St. Louis industry turned their attention. They planned for generations. Science encouraged them. Busi- ness acumen justified the undertaking. The possibilities for St. Louis were pointed out at that time in this glowing language:
"The ore of the Iron Mountain covers an area of some 500 acres. It rises to a height of some 260 feet above the general level of the country and is estimated to contain above the surface over two hundred million tons of ore. The ore is found in lumps from the size of pebbles of a few ounces to those of 200 or 300 pounds in weight, and is gathered from the surface from base to summit to the extent of thousands of tons without any difficulty."
Quality as well as quantity of the ore encouraged the belief that St. Louis "should have the most extensive iron manufactures in the United States." Of the ores of Iron Mountain and of contiguous mines it was said that they "usually yield some 68 to 70 per cent of pure iron, and it is so free from injurious sub- stances as to present no obstacle to working it into blooms. The metal is so excellent that much of it and also that from the Pilot Knob is now used by the manufacturers on the Ohio River for mixing with the ores found there, and is especially esteemed for making nails. Combinations of the ores from Iron Mountain and Pilot Knob, it is said, will form the best iron in the world for rail- road car wheels, and all other purposes requiring great strength and tenacity ; and no doubt rails for roads, made from our own mines, would be stronger, conse- quently safer, wear longer, and for these reasons be cheaper than any other rails that can be made. The ore from the Shepard Mountain, in the same vicinity, is different. It is analogous to the Swedes' iron and possibly may be even better than that for the manufacture of steel. It has been tried for this purpose and found excellent. The farmers in the vicinity now lay their plows with it, while it is used for making cold chisels. The agent of Jessup & Sons of Sheffield, England, has ordered ten tons of this particular iron shipped to England for experiment. They make large quantities of steel."
Deposits Believed to Be Inexhaustible.
With perfect confidence the Missourian before the war spoke of the iron deposits near by as "inexhaustible." At Iron Mountain a shaft had been sunk one hundred and forty-four feet. It gave "fifteen feet of clay and ore, thirty feet of white sand, thirty-three feet of blue porphyry and fifty-three feet of pure iron ore in which they are still at work." This was at the base of the mountain. These explorations were thought to justify the conclusion that "no other country in the world of the same extent has so abundant and accessible supply of iron as Missouri."
Economy of production seemed to be greatly in favor of St. Louis iron manu- facturers. It was pointed out that "at the Tennessee works and at the Pennsyl-
BANK of 51
LOUIS
TULT
ST. LOUIS POSTOFFICE, THIRD AND OLIVE STREETS, IN 1858
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vania works it costs from two dollars to five dollars a ton to get the ore to the furnaces. On the Cumberland River, after getting out the ore at the mines and boating it in many instances for miles to the furnaces, it has there to be burned and considerable expense incurred to get it into the furnaces. But at the Knob, the cost of quarrying and hauling, all preparations for smelting the ore, is only from forty to fifty cents per ton, while at the Iron Mountain it is even less."
Two companies in St. Louis were making iron, Chouteau, Harrison and Valle at Iron Mountain, and the Madison Company, in which Lewis V. Bogy was a leading spirit, at Pilot Knob and Shepard Mountain. All of the iron they could turn out was taken by the foundries and machine shops in St. Louis.
"The favored child of the mighty valley of the Mississippi, the city of the Iron Crown," Charles P. Johnson called St. Louis in his address to the state immigration convention, April, 1880. The words were not extravagant. At that time it was confidently believed St. Louis was adjacent to a region "where they have enough ore to run one hundred furnaces for one thousand years."
Pilot Knob.
In 1847 Pilot Knob was considered one of the greatest deposits of iron ore in the country, but it was forty-seven miles from the Mississippi, and the building of a railroad from St. Louis to Iron Mountain had not begun. Lewis V. Bogy purchased an interest in Pilot Knob. The other stockholders became discouraged at the long delay in securing transportation. They offered their shares for sale and Colonel Bogy bought them. The colonel presided over the Pilot Knob Com- pany for some years and gave his attention to the development of the mineral resources. He became president of the Iron Mountain Railroad.
John Magwire was a national authority on iron production in 1872. Eight years before he had made an exhaustive examination of the advantages and adaptability of St. Louis as a manufacturing city for all things manufactured in other parts of the United States. Upon the subject of iron production Mr. Mag- wire had reached conclusions which influenced the investment of considerable St. Louis capital. In November, 1872, he announced : "Everybody now knows that owing to the richness and fusibility of Missouri ores, furnaces using those ores and raw Illinois coal mixed with coke, yield from 25 to 35 per cent more iron per day than furnaces of the same dimensions in any other locality of this country, or in Europe, and that the quality of the iron is excellent; that enough good iron can be produced from Missouri ores and Illinois coal to supply the wants of the country; and the fact is now also well known that good pig iron can be produced in Missouri and Illinois at a cost of labor varying not far from that required in Wales, which is the most favorable country of Europe for making iron. There are greater facilities for obtaining ore and coal in Wales than any other country of Europe, but neither in Wales nor upon any other part of the earth's surface, so far as my information goes, are ore and coal so accessible as in Missouri and Illinois."
Mr. Magwire pointed out that in Wales it required equivalent of the labor of thirteen men one day to produce a ton of pig iron, while in Missouri the requirement was eight men one day. But he added that the Missouri ton would make rail which would last three times as long as the Welsh rail.
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Perfect confidence was felt in the purifying process which was to make good coke out of Illinois coal. The Illinois Patent Coke Company, of which Mr. Meier was president and in which St. Louis capital was invested, used what was called the Osterspeys process. The plant was elaborate. With the minimum of hand labor, three men only being required to convey the coal from the cars through the crushing and washing to the ovens, it was to produce two thousand five hundred bushels of coke daily.
The various iron industries of the St. Louis district used in 1914 approx- imately two hundred thousand tons of pig iron. Of this amount 25,000 tons was made in St. Louis. From 1860 to 1880 the product of Iron Mountain and Pilot Knob was brought to this city and supplied the various iron industries, in addition to the shipments of ore and pig iron to other iron manufacturing centers. In 1890 the Iron Mountain and Pilot Knob deposits were worked out. Since that time the iron industries of St. Louis have drawn from outside of the State the greater part of their raw material. There are invested in these industries $30,000,000, and the annual output of them is estimated at $45,000,000.
Crawford County's Banks.
A common saying is that "every hill in Crawford County contains some kind of mineral." In Crawford was located the first iron furnace "blown in" in Mis- souri. In 1847 this county's industries included not only the manufacture of pig iron but a rolling-mill turned the crude metal into blooms and bar iron. and the manufacturers had branch stores in Springfield and other interior points in Mis- souri for the sale of their product. But the most significant thing about this industry was that the coal used in the rolling-mill was mined right in Crawford. There, in the southern part of the Ozarks, without a railroad dreamed of and with days of wagon transportation to the nearest river point, the mining and manufacture of iron flourished generations ago.
The brown hematite is never taken into consideration. It is everywhere. When a native of Crawford talks about ore he doesn't mean the common stuff of low grade which certain parts of the country are proud to possess. He means the very best of the red and the blue specular. This ore is found in what are called "banks." You hear of a bank, not a mine, yielding so much. The term in a sense explains the peculiar formation. There are no veins, but the ore bodies are heaped or banked up here and there in various sizes and shapes. These banks sometimes project a little above the surface, and there have been many thousands of tons of ore picked up on top of ground and hauled or shipped to the furnaces. Usually the process is to strip off a few feet of earth and rock which cover the bank, and then take the ore out of an open cut or crater-like hole.
As early as 1818 Crawford County had an iron furnace. It was located on the Thickety, in the northeast part of the county. The enterprising proprietors were Reeves and Harrison. This is said to have been the first furnace in Missouri, and if so it was also the first in the Mississippi Valley. In 1826 the Meramec, or, as they were first called, the Massey, iron works were in operation, turning out nine tons of iron a week. Later the product reached twenty tons a week.
The Model Midland.
The Midland of Crawford County in the days of its successful operation was a model industrial community. William H. Lee, who afterwards became the
A SAND BLUFF AT SILICA
LAKE PARK SPRINGS AT NEVADA
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head of the Merchants-Laclede National Bank in St. Louis, was first the super- intendent and later the president of the Midland Company. He organized this model community. The Midland, under Mr. Lee's management, never knew a strike nor a conflict of any kind with labor. To say a word against Mr. Lee in the presence of workmen was dangerous. All the places of trust and confidence were filled by promotion as vacancies occurred. A ten months' school instead of the usual two months by the district was sustained by the company. Education of the children of the employes was required. A fine large school house was equipped with a stage and entertainments were given at frequent intervals throughout the winter. One illustration of the company's policy was seen in the free distribution of ice during the summer. Every family was furnished a ticket good for ten pounds of ice at the door of the company's ice house each day during the summer. When mid-winter came and the crop on the river was ready for harvest the superintendent called for volunteers. The workmen turned out and in a very short time filled the ice house to the eaves.
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