Mining the Hills

Practically every town in the Uplands has some old mine or quarry. An amazing variety of minerals and metals was sought in these old diggings: iron, lead, silver, nickel, tungsten, cobalt, bismuth, arsenic, quartz, feldspar, mica, marble, granite, garnet (the state mineral), clay, natural cement, and gemstones. In 1880 an unsuccessful oil well was drilled in the Pomperaug Valley; there were also several fraudulent attempts to mine gold. One historian, Charles Rufus Harte, has maintained that:

Apparently it was only necessary for someone to dig a hole, allege that it reached a valuable mineral deposit, and organize a company to work it - "it" usually proving to be the stockholders - to have the otherwise staid and sedate citizens fall over each other in their rush to subscribe to the venture.¹³

Most of the mines in the Uplands amounted to little more than a hill of dreams and produced little other than bankrupt companies and fabulous tales of "lost lodes."

Despite a long list of failures, a few of these ventures were successful, and some continue to be. Probably the most important colonial and early American mining industry in the state was the now-defunct iron mining in the Marble Valley. Several large open-pit mines operated from 1734 to 1923, all west of Cameron's Line in the towns of Salisbury, Canaan, Cornwall, and Kent. These operations worked strikingly colored, yellow-brown deposits of the mineral limonite from large pockets in the surrounding marble bedrock. Limonite is chemically the same substance as rust (hydrous iron oxide), and was relatively easy for the crude technology of the day to convert to pure iron. The conversion of ore to iron took place in stone blast furnaces lined with heat-resistant brick. Three of these furnaces, the Mount Riga furnace in Salisbury, the Beckley No. 2 furnace in Canaan, and the Kent Furnace in Kent have been preserved in historic parks. Several of the old mining pits have been flooded by ground water and are now lakes; the rest are overgrown and forgotten.

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