Carp River Forge: Where the Iron Age Began in the Upper Peninsula

On February tenth, eighteen forty-eight, a forgemaster named Ariel Barney lit fires on the banks of the Carp River, a few miles from an iron ore deposit that miners called the Jackson Mine. What came out of those fires was the first iron ever smelted from Lake Superior ore. That moment, in the deep wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was the beginning of an industry that would eventually supply more than half the iron ore mined in the United States.

The iron ore of the Marquette Range had been discovered in eighteen forty-four almost by accident. William Austin Burt, a federal surveyor, noticed that his magnetic compass was spinning wildly as his party moved through the wilderness near present-day Negaunee. The readings made no sense. He eventually understood that the ground beneath his feet was saturated with iron, so much iron that it was interfering with the compass needle. The discovery set off a scramble by investors from southern Michigan to stake claims and figure out how to extract the ore.

The problem was getting the iron into a usable form. The Jackson Iron Company constructed the forge on the Carp River in eighteen forty-seven and eighteen forty-eight, and Barney got it operating that February. The forge had eight fires. Each fire produced a lump of iron roughly every six hours, which workers then placed under a hammer and shaped into blooms, square bars used in manufacturing. Daily production was about three tons when things ran smoothly, which was rare.

The forge operated until eighteen fifty-four, when more efficient processing methods made the small riverside operation obsolete. But the six years the Carp River Forge ran established the Marquette Range as the heart of American iron production. Cities were built to service the mines. A railroad was constructed to haul ore to Marquette, where ships carried it east through the Great Lakes. The iron that built the railroads, the bridges, and eventually the skyscrapers of industrial America started at a forge on a river most people have never heard of.