[Illustration: _The Hammersmith ironworks on the Saugus River in Massachusetts as they are believed to have looked in 1650. Along with documentary records, extensive remains found below ground at the site--and some above--have permitted a careful rebuilding of the entire complex. Redrawn after an architectural rendering in the Saugus Museum._]
Governor Alexander Spotswood re-launched the iron industry in Virginia with the financial backing of several gentlemen in the colony and in England, and with the skilled labor of immigrant ironworkers from Germany. By 1718 it appears that his Tubal works, near the confluence of the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers, were in production, although he had not yet received the London government's permission even to start the project.
Fourteen years later Spotswood (by then out of office) told William Byrd II of Westover that iron mines and blast furnaces were operating at four locations in Virginia. Byrd visited and described those at Tubal, not far from Germanna, at Fredericksville, and at Massaponax (now called New Post) below Fredericksburg. Spotswood had an interest in the second, and was sole proprietor of the first and third, having bought out his original backers.
The fourth was at Accokeek, near the Potomac, on land belonging to Augustine Washington, whose son George had just been born. Byrd, who did not get that far on his 1732 "Progress to the Mines," nevertheless confidently reported that "Matters are very well managed there, and no expense is spared to make them profitable, which is not the case in the works I have already mentioned." This judgment may have been accurate for all we know, but it seems unkind of Byrd to throw the only bouquet to the one place he had not seen while dropping brickbats on the men who had been so hospitable and helpful to him.
His criticism was certainly well founded in one case. The furnace at Fredericksville (a place no longer on the map) had been idle the entire summer. Somewhat like the rider who was lost for want of a horseshoe nail, here the blast furnace could not operate even though ore, limestone, charcoal, waterpower, and skilled labor were all available. The missing "nail" in this case was corn. There was not enough to feed the oxen that hauled the carts that carried the ore from mine to furnace and the sows from furnace to dockside on the Rappahannock some twenty-four miles away.