Iron Works
In 1843, a limonite gossan, a form of iron ore, was discovered on nearby Ore Mountain. The gossan was the primary source of mined ore. It overlaid a pyrrhotite deposit of iron sulfide ore. Assuming the depth matches the known surface area, this deposit would be among the world's largest sulfide deposits. However, the rural location and poor quality of the ore continues to make it uneconomic to mine.
Piscataquis Iron Works Company enlarged the mining operation in 1876 to the most significant iron works in the state. Eighteen beehive kilns converted wood to charcoal for a 55-foot high rock blast furnace producing about 2,000 tons of pig iron annually. A company town was constructed where the West Branch of the Pleasant River flows out of Silver Lake with a town hall, school, post office, cooperative store, and homes for 200 families. The 19-mile (31-km) Bangor and Katahdin Iron Works Railway was built in 1881 to connect the town with what would become the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad at Milo, Maine.
Read more about this topic: Katahdin Iron Works
Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or works:
“With our principles we seek to rule our habits with an iron hand, or to justify, honor, scold, or conceal them:Mtwo men with identical principles are likely to be seeking fundamentally different things with them.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)