PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Gallionella and Leptothrix live at the bottom of the bog where they make iron grow. Iron compounds dissolved upstream are freed downstream when washed with the peaty, acid-rich waters where this pond-bottom team of anaerobic bacteria live and consume and concentrate the iron particles into tubor-like buds.
Medieval armorers relied on men with rods who poked across swampland to harvest the buds. A clever bog harvester preserved his resources by carefully replacing the peat and marking locations so a generation later his children might return and harvest his crop of iron tubors.
And the magical arts of refining bog ore into workable metal belonged to genius alchemists, who knew the secrets of mixing the iron with charcoal and flux, of fanning the hot mix, feeding the furnace at the top so it bloomed at the bottom.
There was bog iron enough for the armorers and blacksmiths, but the Faustian dreams of scientists and inventors required rock dug from hills. And some rocks were barren while others bore ores. Rich veins of iron were discovered around 1730 near what was soon to be the town of Salisbury and then here in Canaan and elsewhere in the northwest hills of the colony called Connecticut. By the revolution a thriving iron industry flourished in the region and farmers and farm blacksmiths learned to make the tools needed to build and grow a nation.
Today the furnaces they built are unlikely tombstones along country roads in the frozen earth. They recall iron wills chained across the Hudson opposing English rule as they also represent axes and plowshares, hammers and nails. It was no picnic, making that iron. and a hungry furnace consumed forests for charcoal and branded circles on the forest floor still visible today, The forests have regrown, and this is no longer an industrial center nor even an especially busy picnic site.
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Below, charcoal kilns in Wassaic, NY, provided charcoal for local iron-making and a lime kiln in Sharon baked limestone to make lime used as flux.
