Cleveland’s Iron Ore Merchants and the Lake Superior Iron Ore Trade, 1855–1900

On August 17, 1855, the two-masted brig Columbia locked through the newly opened canal at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, which linked Lake Superior to Lake Huron. It carried 132 tons of iron ore bound for Cleveland from a recently opened mine on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. From this small beginning, the Lake Superior iron ore trade quickly blossomed into a giant. By 1900, Lake Superior mines supplied the bulk of iron ore consumed in America. The iron and steel produced from Lake Superior ores furnished rails for America’s railroads, structural steel for its bridges and buildings, armor plate for its warships, and, eventually, the primary materials that went into the manufacture of appliances and automobiles. By 1888 iron ore had become the leading article of freight on the Great Lakes. In 1911, one expert would describe the Great Lakes ore traffic as the “greatest single trade in the world.”¹

Iron Ore Shipping Routes, circa 1900 (from Cyrus C. Adams, An Elementary Commercial Geography [New York: Appleton and Co., 1903], 114).

The epicenter of the Great Lakes ore trade was Cleveland.² While its location as a critical transshipment point between the Great Lakes and the blast furnaces and steel mills of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania contributed to Cleveland’s dominant position, that alone was insufficient. Other Lake Erie ports were geographically competitive. Cleveland got its edge from the early emergence of a small group of firms focused on the ore trade: Cleveland’s iron ore merchants. They played the role of specialized middlemen in the trade, providing the link between producers on Lake Superior and consumers in the states bordering the lower Great Lakes more than five hundred miles distant.³ Despite their importance to the ore trade and to the emergence of Cleveland as a commercial and industrial center, this group has been little studied.⁴ This essay is a first attempt, based heavily on scattered correspondence from these firms uncovered in archives in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to clarify the role of the Cleveland iron ore merchant firms in the Great Lakes iron trade in the late nineteenth century.

Most accounts of the American iron and steel industry and its consolidation around 1900 focus on the producers of the final product—the blast furnaces and steel mills and the companies that controlled them. The raw material inputs necessary to the functioning of the industry, whether iron ore or coal, often receive short shrift. Yet the immense quantities and high quality of these natural resource inputs made possible the emergence of a world-class iron and steel industry in America. An analysis of the role of Cleveland’s iron ore merchants in the early history of the iron trade and their adaptation to the backward integration of steel firms into mining and shipping around 1900 provides a perspective of the American iron and steel industry from those involved in the natural resource side of the industry different than the usual furnace-and-mill-centered accounts.

In many ways, the American iron and steel industry after about 1875 was unique. Before 1875 in America, and in most other countries even later, the blast furnaces that reduced iron ore to pig iron, making it ready for conversion into steel and other useful materials, relied on ores mined in the vicinity.⁵ Beginning around 1860, however, some Ohio and Pennsylvania blast furnaces began to use ores from newly discovered deposits in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near Lake Superior, more than five hundred miles away, attracted by their richness, purity, and quantity. The development of cheap Great Lakes transportation made this possible. The system that evolved to move ore from the mines of Upper Michigan and Minnesota to blast furnaces in the lower Great Lakes states was complex, subject to bottlenecks and interruptions at multiple points. In simplified form it looked like Table 1 below.

Table 1.

Lake Superior Iron Ore Trade System

When the Lake...