Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

History of the United States by Mary Ritter Beard;Charles A. Beard
page 46 of 800 (05%)
England, they who already are not very fond of submitting to government
will soon think of putting in execution designs they have long harboured
in their breasts. This will not seem strange when you consider what sort
of people this country is inhabited by."

=The Iron Industry.=--Almost equally widespread was the art of iron
working--one of the earliest and most picturesque of colonial
industries. Lynn, Massachusetts, had a forge and skilled artisans within
fifteen years after the founding of Boston. The smelting of iron began
at New London and New Haven about 1658; in Litchfield county,
Connecticut, a few years later; at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in
1731; and near by at Lenox some thirty years after that. New Jersey had
iron works at Shrewsbury within ten years after the founding of the
colony in 1665. Iron forges appeared in the valleys of the Delaware and
the Susquehanna early in the following century, and iron masters then
laid the foundations of fortunes in a region destined to become one of
the great iron centers of the world. Virginia began iron working in the
year that saw the introduction of slavery. Although the industry soon
lapsed, it was renewed and flourished in the eighteenth century.
Governor Spotswood was called the "Tubal Cain" of the Old Dominion
because he placed the industry on a firm foundation. Indeed it seems
that every colony, except Georgia, had its iron foundry. Nails, wire,
metallic ware, chains, anchors, bar and pig iron were made in large
quantities; and Great Britain, by an act in 1750, encouraged the
colonists to export rough iron to the British Islands.

=Shipbuilding.=--Of all the specialized industries in the colonies,
shipbuilding was the most important. The abundance of fir for masts, oak
for timbers and boards, pitch for tar and turpentine, and hemp for rope
made the way of the shipbuilder easy. Early in the seventeenth century a
DigitalOcean Referral Badge