NEW APPALACHIAN MOMENTS BLOG POST!!!
From Scott Ballard
Mining in the upper northwestern section of North Carolina begins with soapstone, then on to iron… and ends with copper.
Native American peoples quarried the easily carving soapstone into bowls and figures millennia ago, the likes of which have been found is trade networks from here to Ohio.
And just after Ashe County, NC was formed in 1799 there was iron being produced, forged and shipped as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. During the Civil War, iron from Ashe County mines was used to forge gun barrels for the Confederacy.
It’s easy to see why iron mining was a priority because nearly all agricultural instruments needed iron to be manufactured…from hoes, mattocks and harrows to….hinges and nails.
Iron ore from Ashe County was produced for almost 100 years before cheaper iron from other states made it unprofitable to continue the mines locally.
The opening of the Virginia-Carolina Railroad, better known as the Virginia Creeper, in 1914, reopened a flurry of activity of mining, but even that was short-lived in a continuation of the boom and bust cycles…by 1922 local efforts to revive the industry had failed.
The father of mining in Ashe County was Meredith Ballou. Born in Virginia, he came to Ashe County about 1800. While all of us have iron in our blood, Ballou had more than his fair share, as his father, a native Frenchman, was a mining engineer.
Ballou built a forge (known in the trade as a “bloomery”) on the New River and had a mutual admiration society with Geologist Dr. Elisha Mitchell, for whom Mt. Mitchell is named. By Ballou’s death in 1847 he had acquired several hundred acres and the mining rights for many more acres of land in Ashe County. One of those mining sites would later put Ashe County on the national map.
That particular 300-acre tract, later descriptively known as Ore Knob, was originally acquired for the iron deposits, but Ballou and his children abandoned it because it was, “so badly adulterated with copper as to be worthless.” What a shame!
In fact, the Ballous thought so little of the tract that they let it go and the county sheriff auctioned it off to collect the past due taxes. The balance after taxes was $11 and so each of the 11 surviving Ballou children received one dollar apiece for the Ore Knob property.
Ore Knob was briefly reopened before the Civil War for mining that copper. Miners sank shafts up to 90 feet deep making from 50 cents to a dollar a day. But transportation to Wytheville, Virginia by ox-cart wagons proved to be too expensive and time-consuming, so the mine again closed down.
Join us again next week for Part Two of Digging into Ashe County history as the mine and community ride the rocky road of boom and bust. Please share your mining or Ore Knob stories in the comment section! If you’d like to listen to the audio version please click below: