The Mining Industry

The Mining Industry. . , Jasper , Mining and quarrying have been important activities in the Macungie area for many hundreds of years. The first rock to be extracted from the ground to be used by humans was jasper, which the Lenape Indians used for their tools and weapons. Jasper is hard like flint, and was shaped by striking it with a round, hand-held stone. It was "knapped" into arrowheads, spear tips, scrapers, and knives with very sharp edges. Jasper was traded far and wide across North America, and many of the roads we use today follow the Indians' trading paths., Limestone , Early German settlers had a decided preference for limestone soils, which are found here throughout the valley floor. To maintain fertility farmers used animal manures, and learned to spread their fields every few years with lime that they burned in small lime kilns on their farms. Lime for mortar, plaster, whitewash, and disinfectant for outhouses was burned in large limekilns. Some large limestone quarries sold the rock for flux in iron furnaces., Iron Ore , You are standing very close to Jonas Bastian's mine, one of many mines in Lower Macungie Township. Iron ore was extracted from large pits, cleaned in a washery on the site to remove clay, then hauled to furnaces in Macungie, Alburtis, Emmaus, and elsewhere. Some was taken to loading wharves along the East Pennsylvania Railroad. A large accumulation of clay mine wash was left in the area of Jonas Bastian's mine here at Hamilton Crossings, and had to be removed before building could take place., Making and shaping iron became the biggest industry in Lehigh County after the first commercially successful anthracite-fueled iron furnace in the United States was "blown in" in 1840 at Catasauqua, along the Lehigh Canal., Within a short time, iron furnaces were built at other locations along the Lehigh River between Catasauqua and Allentown and later along railroads., Before iron became cheap and plentiful, most tools had been made of wood, often reinforced with iron. With an abundant source of affordable iron, mechanics, engineers, and farmers all found ways to use the material to make new types of tools, engines, and equipment. One of the innovative farmers who secured patents on improved farm machinery was Elias Bastian, who owned and operated the farm where Hamilton Crossings stands., [Sidebar:] , About our Headframe Display , "If it's not grown, it's mined." The Lehigh Valley was once the largest pig iron producing region in the country. Iron ore was mined from numerous open pit and underground mines. Three mines on this property and many more were nearby. Headframes, resembling the tower that you see across the way, used wire rope and a large pulley, known as a sheave wheel, to raise mine cars full of ore from underground mines. The ore was transported to blast furnaces where it was smelted into pig iron that was then either cast into products at foundries or further processed into wrought iron or steel., [Captions:] , The drawing of the ancient Perkiomen-Lehigh path shows how tribes came directly into the Macungie area for jasper. East-west and north-south paths converged in the vicinity of the quarries. "Indian Paths of Pennsylvania" by Paul A.W. Wallace. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1987., The Indian jasper mines are marked on the geological map of Lehigh County. People who live in the Vera Cruz and Macungie areas are very familiar with finding chunks of jasper on their land., All these arrowheads were found in Lower Macungie fields. Some are partly finished, and some are damaged. The black ones may have been acquired by a local tribesman through trading with Indians from elsewhere. Brown is the natural color; the red pieces had been heated in fires to make the rocks easy to break into smaller pieces of the size wanted for knapping., Several large limestone quarries provided limestone to be used in the iron furnaces in Alburtis and Macungie. It served as a flux when heated in the furnace stack with the anthracite and iron ore. This quarry was off Route 100 near Ancient Oak South. It had a lime kiln for burning limestone for agricultural and building uses. Numerous small quarries had an adjacent lime kiln that produced small quarries of burnt lime for farm use., Iron ore was extracted from mines in the sections of Lower and Upper Macungie that were underlain by limestone, and from deep mines along South Mountain. The magnetic mountain ore was relatively clean, but the ore found in the valley came out of the ground mixed with clay. Before it could be used in a furnace the very sticky clay had to be washed off. A log washer above the mine washed the clay deposits off the ore, and sluiceways carried the clay away from the active mine, or sometimes to an exhausted part of the mine. The washery here (circa 1888) provided ore to the Macungie Furnace.