Blast Furnaces

I didn't get a very good idea of what mines and blast furnaces looked like from chapters 11 and 12 in Schneider's The Adirondacks. Sure, I got an idea of their numbers, locations, effectiveness, and success throughout time, but I couldn't get a good picture in my mind of what the mines actually looked like or how they worked. After doing a little research I was surprised to discover that blast furnaces are actually aesthetically pleasing structures, and now many of them are now an interesting and unique part of the landscape. They are useless antiques, picturesque and historically interesting vestiges of a different time.

The image pictured above is of the Tahawus blast furnace, under ten miles southwest of Mt. Marcy. This particular blast furnace was built in 1854, and is actually a well-visited historical site, partly because it is in the town in which Roosevelt became president in 1901. This particular furnace is pretty standard late 1800's design, simple but effective. Several layers fire-resistant bricks line the inside of the chamber, where the iron is extracted from its less pure ore in a process called smelting. Sometimes an attached water wheel powers bellows at the base of the structure.

I understand of course that while the blasting furnaces themselves were not so harmful to the surrounding Adirondacks, the actual mining was more so. Regardless, seeing pictures of and reading about the details of these furnaces has helped me understand a little more how these early miners and other beneficiaries of the Adirondack woods were able to blithely ignore the fact that they were destroying forests and the natural world, something that is certainly a little cringeworthy today. The scale of these furnaces make me more aware of just how large the wilderness must have seemed to these miners. The forests must have felt inexhaustibly large, virtually unlimited in resources and more vast than we can imagine today with our enormous spheres of influence. I think it is important to have this idea at the forefront of one's mind while studying the history of the Adirondacks.


sources:
http://apa.ny.gov/Press/OSI_Tahawus.htm
http://www.david-morse.com/severngorge/blastfurnaces.php
http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g28953-d543501-i89576133-Adirondack_Mountains-New_York.html