Mine Hill in Franklin and Sterling Hill in Ogdensburg, New Jersey: Mining History, 1765-1900 (review)

Historians of technology will easily find books on the North American iron and steel industry, and several on copper, although these deal primarily with the West. They will find sparse coverage of the other nonferrous metals and virtually nothing on the mining and smelting of zinc, a metal only slightly second to copper in importance in the years before the advent of large-scale production of aluminum. Pete Dunn's research on Mine Hill in New Jersey is doubly welcome because it presents the story of a prominent zinc enterprise and because it is about a major eastern metallurgical industry that had large economic, social, and environmental consequences.

Mineral collectors have long favored the mine complex in the towns of Franklin and Ogdensburg as a locality for garnering prize specimens. Geologists find it an ideal place to test their theories of ore-mineral formation, and have created a large technical literature on its unique character. Dunn's lifetime of professional work on this mine complex is the basis of his seven-volume compilation on the mines, miners, entrepreneurs, and their machinations as they first made iron and then built a nationally important zinc industry.

If you are a scholar interested in nineteenth-century American business history or the story of the zinc industry, and if you have ever had to search out material in obscure, uncataloged archives and then decipher faded, dog-eared documents written in difficult hands, you will appreciate Pete Dunn. He has done all this tedious labor for you. His multivolume work includes transcriptions of the letters, deeds, court records, and company papers relating to New Jersey zinc. It appears that little, if anything, has escaped his work on Mine Hill and the companies associated with it. Here is the primary research already done for the future historian of eastern nonferrous metallurgy.

Several themes emerge as one peruses Dunn's volumes. One concerns the machinations of the speculators and capitalists who squabbled over mine claims and patent rights. Their numerous lawsuits left a rich documentary record. Business historians will find the histories of the successive iron and zinc companies. A bit of searching turns up data on environmental and transportation issues. Even though one can browse, one does not sit down to read through these volumes as a story; they constitute a massive and generously illustrated collection of primary source materials interspersed with interpretive summaries and observations. The work is well-organized, fully indexed, and carefully documented. Now we need a historian of the early nonferrous industry of the United States to make a story out of it.