Saugus Iron Works--Visual 2

How to Use the Images

Inquiry Question
Historical Context

Maps

Readings

Photos 1 & 2
Photo 3 & Drawing 1

Activities

Table of
Contents

Visual Evidence

Illustration 1: Map of Saugus, Lynn, and Nahant from Alonzo Lewis, History of Lynn, Boston, 1844.

[Illustration 1] with link to higher quality illustration.

(Courtesy of The Lynn Museum)

Chart 1: Materials and techniques for making iron.

WATER	The Saugus River provided a means of transportation and water-power. A canal fed water from a dam upstream into sluiceways leading to each building.
WOOD	Trees were cut by woodcutters, and skilled colliers (charcoal makers) converted the wood into charcoal. Charcoal was the fuel used at the blast furnace and in the hearths.
IRON ORE	Bog iron ore, containing 30 percent to 50 percent of useable iron, was dug out of bogs, swamps, and dried up river beds by the miners. Eastern Massachusetts was found to have large quantities of bog ore.
FLUX	Flux was a substance that combined with the impurities in the iron ore to free the iron from the ore. Gabbro, a dark igneous rock containing calcium carbonate, was transported from Nahant and used as a flux at the Saugus Iron Works.

Saugus was chosen as the site for an ironworks because of the availability of the four necessary natural resources--water, iron ore, charcoal, and flux.

Questions for Illustration 1 & Chart 1

1. Study Illustration 1 and Chart 1. Illustration 1 is a section of a 19th-century map drawn to show how the region looked in the 1600s and 1700s. Locate the towns of Saugus, Lynn, and Nahant, and the site of the ironworks.

2. Using Illustration 1 and Chart 1, suggest why Saugus might have been a good spot for an ironworks. Why would it have been important for an iron furnace to be close to needed raw materials?

3. Locate the sites where the natural resources described in Chart 1 were found. How do they think gabbro was transported to the ironworks from Nahant?

4. What can you conclude about the relationship between the location of natural resources and the establishment of the industry? What can you conclude about where the iron products would be marketed?

* The illustration on this screen has a resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi), and therefore will print poorly. You can obtain a high quality version of Illustration 1, but be aware that the file will take as much as 34 seconds to load with a 28.8K modem.

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