This blog begins with a photo that is in itself, conclusive proof that those who built and used the pit iron furnaces of Ohio were in transition from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. The photo shows a cast iron hand axe found by the author in 2002 on the banks of the North Fork of Paint Creek at a site that was then a part of the Garret farm. It is now park land owned by the City of Chillicothe, my hometown.
I found it because followed in the footsteps of Arlington Mallery, my old mentor, to seek conclusive proof such furnaces are prehistoric. I believe this tool was used to crush iron ore and other materials used in such furances.
Arlington Mallery was born in Syracuse, New York in 1877 into, as he put it, "a family of bridge builders." In his book, "Lost America," he tells how as a boy he worked in his father's stone quarries in northern New York State. It was there he gained his first experience with metallurgy, forging and tempering tools such as drills, chisels, axes and adzes. Mallery said he laid many a stone in his father's bridge foundations and even helped erect the steel framework.
After completing engineering school in college (at Syracuse?), he became a registered professional engineer, and was known for building some of the first steel arch bridges for Ohio highways in the 1920's and 30's.
I was introduced to Mallery when I was a high school student in Chillicothe, Ohio, the Ross County seat in the summer of 1949. He was renting a room in spacious, white frame home of Elza Shoemaker and his wife, Alma. They were my sister's in-laws, in nearby Bourneville, Ohio, where Shoemaker was the elementary school principal. Bourneville's homes frame a shaded stretch of U.S. Route 50, about 12 miles southwest of Chillicothe, in the fertile valley of Paint Creek. Spruce Hill, the archaeological site Mallery came to Ohio to investigate, stands 400 feet above the village to its south across the valley.
That summer after my first year of high school, I was quite interested in science and archaeology. I was very pleased to meet Mallery, already famous locally because of the newspaper stories about the "Viking iron furnaces" he had claimed he discovered in Ross County. Beginning in 1949, and continuing for several years, newspapers ran stories about Mallery's archaeological claims and his clashes with professional archaeologists.
In the local press, mainly newspapers in Chillicothe and Columbus, and in his 1951 book, Lost America, Mallery classified several Ross County pit furnaces he investigated as "Nordic" or "Celtic" for their resemblances to ancient Old World pit iron smelters. He said his evidence pointed "to the Norse of Greenland" as those responsible for the furnaces, declared that the furnaces were "pre-Columbian," certainly the work of visitors from the Old World, if not the Norsemen themselves. Mallery believed that there was a "pre-Columbian Iron Age" in America and that the furnaces he discovered in Ohio were proof of this.
In the publicity which appeared when his book, Lost America, was published in 1951, Mallery is described as a linguist who "learned the Greek alphabet almost before the English" with a knowledge of Latin, German, Icelandic and Norse languages. In 1951, Mallery still resided in a Washington, D.C. town house on "O" Street NW, where he lived between the world wars while running his bridge construction business. On his business letterhead, which he continued to use in his retirement, Mallery identified himself as an "industrial engineer" specializing in "bridges and mechanical brick plants."
In 1949, I could have scarcely realized that someday I would accompany Mallery on some of his digs, write about his work for magazines and newspapers, and eventually, become an amateur archaeologist myself to continue the investigation of the Ross County iron furnaces. However, beginning in 1963, such events began to occur.
When Mallery returned to Ohio in December 1962 to collect samples of charcoal from his archaeological sites for radiocarbon dating, family members and friends suggested that I write something about Mallery and his furnaces. I was just a few months into my first job as a newspaper reporter, but I knew stories about Mallery's archaeology would likely sell to Fate Magazine. I'd been reading it all through high school because of my interest in the UFO phenomena.
Fate reported on all things strange, unusual, supernatural and extraterrestrial; including a continuing coverage of unorthodox archaeological subjects. This all fit in well with my fascination with science fiction and my impatience with mundane "authorities and experts" who did not believe spaceflight to the moon was possible, as I most certainly did.
So from the beginning of my association with Mallery, I planned to write about his unorthodox archaeological research primarily for Fate, and only secondarily as a local news story. I began to correspond with the managing editor of Fate, Curtis Fuller, and it is my files of correspondence with Fuller that are proving to be a valuable resource when writing about my work with Mallery over 30 years ago.
After completing engineering school in college (at Syracuse?), he became a registered professional engineer, and was known for building some of the first steel arch bridges for Ohio highways in the 1920's and 30's.
I was introduced to Mallery when I was a high school student in Chillicothe, Ohio, the Ross County seat in the summer of 1949. He was renting a room in spacious, white frame home of Elza Shoemaker and his wife, Alma. They were my sister's in-laws, in nearby Bourneville, Ohio, where Shoemaker was the elementary school principal. Bourneville's homes frame a shaded stretch of U.S. Route 50, about 12 miles southwest of Chillicothe, in the fertile valley of Paint Creek. Spruce Hill, the archaeological site Mallery came to Ohio to investigate, stands 400 feet above the village to its south across the valley.
That summer after my first year of high school, I was quite interested in science and archaeology. I was very pleased to meet Mallery, already famous locally because of the newspaper stories about the "Viking iron furnaces" he had claimed he discovered in Ross County. Beginning in 1949, and continuing for several years, newspapers ran stories about Mallery's archaeological claims and his clashes with professional archaeologists.
In the local press, mainly newspapers in Chillicothe and Columbus, and in his 1951 book, Lost America, Mallery classified several Ross County pit furnaces he investigated as "Nordic" or "Celtic" for their resemblances to ancient Old World pit iron smelters. He said his evidence pointed "to the Norse of Greenland" as those responsible for the furnaces, declared that the furnaces were "pre-Columbian," certainly the work of visitors from the Old World, if not the Norsemen themselves. Mallery believed that there was a "pre-Columbian Iron Age" in America and that the furnaces he discovered in Ohio were proof of this.
In the publicity which appeared when his book, Lost America, was published in 1951, Mallery is described as a linguist who "learned the Greek alphabet almost before the English" with a knowledge of Latin, German, Icelandic and Norse languages. In 1951, Mallery still resided in a Washington, D.C. town house on "O" Street NW, where he lived between the world wars while running his bridge construction business. On his business letterhead, which he continued to use in his retirement, Mallery identified himself as an "industrial engineer" specializing in "bridges and mechanical brick plants."
In 1949, I could have scarcely realized that someday I would accompany Mallery on some of his digs, write about his work for magazines and newspapers, and eventually, become an amateur archaeologist myself to continue the investigation of the Ross County iron furnaces. However, beginning in 1963, such events began to occur.
When Mallery returned to Ohio in December 1962 to collect samples of charcoal from his archaeological sites for radiocarbon dating, family members and friends suggested that I write something about Mallery and his furnaces. I was just a few months into my first job as a newspaper reporter, but I knew stories about Mallery's archaeology would likely sell to Fate Magazine. I'd been reading it all through high school because of my interest in the UFO phenomena.
Fate reported on all things strange, unusual, supernatural and extraterrestrial; including a continuing coverage of unorthodox archaeological subjects. This all fit in well with my fascination with science fiction and my impatience with mundane "authorities and experts" who did not believe spaceflight to the moon was possible, as I most certainly did.
So from the beginning of my association with Mallery, I planned to write about his unorthodox archaeological research primarily for Fate, and only secondarily as a local news story. I began to correspond with the managing editor of Fate, Curtis Fuller, and it is my files of correspondence with Fuller that are proving to be a valuable resource when writing about my work with Mallery over 30 years ago.
I was not able to maintain complete journalistic detachment while working on the story. And I realized to get the story, I had to help create it. This experience was useful later on as I covered controversial subjects writing a weekly science column while on the news staff of the Springfield Daily News, Springfield, Ohio.
The Mallery I met in 1962 was not the bright, energetic fellow with the military bearing I met in Bourneville in 1949. I spent many weekends with him in 1963 and 1964 and was always trying to obtain more biographical information from him. Every time I'd try to interview him about this, I might enter one new item in my notebook before he'd switch over to one of several anecdotes I'd already heard. Frequently, it was the one about how he organized a political campaign to drive corrupt Syracuse city officials out of office with his slate of "Bull Moose" candidates.
Mallery's military service, however, was included in his repertoire of favorite tales to tell. He told me that he had served in the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. During the Spanish war, Mallery said he got only as far as Florida before it ended, and wasn't involved in the fighting in World War One. That made World War II his favorite war to remember and his war stories were so vivid I felt sure he was not making them up.
The Mallery I met in 1962 was not the bright, energetic fellow with the military bearing I met in Bourneville in 1949. I spent many weekends with him in 1963 and 1964 and was always trying to obtain more biographical information from him. Every time I'd try to interview him about this, I might enter one new item in my notebook before he'd switch over to one of several anecdotes I'd already heard. Frequently, it was the one about how he organized a political campaign to drive corrupt Syracuse city officials out of office with his slate of "Bull Moose" candidates.
Mallery's military service, however, was included in his repertoire of favorite tales to tell. He told me that he had served in the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. During the Spanish war, Mallery said he got only as far as Florida before it ended, and wasn't involved in the fighting in World War One. That made World War II his favorite war to remember and his war stories were so vivid I felt sure he was not making them up.
A captain of cargo ships that sailed through Atlantic Ocean enroute to England over waters infested with Nazi submarines, and Mallery said he was he recalled how he saw other ships in his conveys struck by torpedoes and sink. Later during the war, Mallery said he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Guinea during the fighting with the Japanese Army there.
Indeed, Mallery told me that he could converse with the New Guinea natives and that he went behind enemy lines to gain intelligence information from the natives about the whereabouts and the movement of units of the Japanese Army. Wounded during an exchange of gunfire with the Japanese, he was carried through the jungle on a litter by the natives to reach the American forces for medical treatment. At the end of the war, Mallery retired from engineering and devoted his time to studies of antiquity, including archaeology, cartography, metallurgy, and linguistics.
Mallery, then 86 years old, lacked both transportation and help in the summer of 1963, so I furnished both. Reluctantly, I helped him dig and collect artifacts, because I wanted to write a feature story about his furnaces for the Columbus newspaper, and knew Mallery would not get the digging done without me. Looking back now, I realize becoming involved with the work was fortunate accident. What I learned enabled me to come back many years later and begin the work to solve the furnace mystery.
In 1963, Mallery was remembered locally as the discoverer of "Viking iron furnaces" in Ross County. By then, I had graduated from Ohio University with a degree in journalism. I was a reporter for a major Ohio newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. I was also by then skeptical about Mallery's claims. My education at Ohio University had included two years as a physics major as a preparation for a career in science writing. I questioned whether iron be smelted in a hole in the ground as Mallery claimed, and also whether Norse explorers had reached Ohio nearly 1,000 years ago and remained there long enough to smelt iron ore. I was more curious than cautious, so I decided to take a chance on Mallery as the subject of a news story.
A quirk of fate, however, prevented the news story I wrote about Mallery and his furnaces from appearing in the Dispatch's Sunday edition. On my day off, the Friday before the Sunday the story was to be published, Mallery unexpectedly appeared at the newspaper office and asked to see me to review my story. After learning I was off for the day, he demanded to see my story anyway. He took exception to some trivial parts of it and, in general, left a negative impression about his mental competence with one of the editors.
My earlier fears that Mallery's advanced age had eroded his reasoning powers were realized. Sadly, Mallery had become his own worst opponent. Because of Mallery's objections, the story was pulled from the layout of the paper. By the time I had returned to the Dispatch newsroom, it was too late to get the story back in the paper. Mallery thus lost what was to be his last chance to spread the word about his iron furnaces and his other work. I feel that had I been in the office that day, I could have prevented this misfortune.
Mallery's son, Paul, of Murray Hill, NJ, was an engineer with AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Both Paul Mallery and his son, Steven, were prominent in New Jersey model railroad circles, and Paul once had a large model railroad layout in the basement of his Murray Hill home. In 1977, I moved to New Jersey to work at Bell Labs myself and met once with Paul Mallery at his home in Murray Hill on Mountain Avenue, just across the street from Bell Labs.
Paul Mallery and I had an interesting talk about his father, Arlington. Paul suggested to me that his father had a habit of magnifying his accomplishments and adventures a bit beyond the underlying reality.
But the old fellow was the first to discover the pit iron furances, and my research of their history indicate these were last used in Europe years before Columbus sailed and discovered America!
But the old fellow was the first to discover the pit iron furances, and my research of their history indicate these were last used in Europe years before Columbus sailed and discovered America!
Becoming both a professional journalist and avocational archaeologist has satisfied my desire to do both and follow, if far behind, footsteps of such giants as Issac Asimov and Carl Sagan who did both quite successfully.
I am now the author of "Iron Age America" a book about the archaeology of America's mysterious furnaces. While the photos to be published in the book are in black and white. However, my web site, "America's Mysterious Furnaces," has been online for the past decade, and it provides color photography of my work in the field and that of other members of the former Archaeo-Pyrogenics Society (APGS) in the early to middle 1990s. The APGS was formed by David Orr of Ross County and I to excavate and scientifically study the furnaces and artifacts found in association with them.
Also, I am very honored to have been assisted, to the extent they felt could, a number of professional archaeologists. You know who are.
"Iron Age America" can now be ordered from Amazon.com, the online book store.
