Although the making of steel goes back to the days before Christ it wasn’t until the mid 1700s that it commenced in the British Colonies in North America. The first steel in the Colonies was made in Salisbury, Connecticut by a physician and blacksmith named Samuel Higley. He was a graduate of Yale, having a degree in medicine. While he practiced medicine, he was also worked as a blacksmith, and copper miner. Steel wasn’t Higley’s only first as he also made the first coins in the Colonies that he traded for rum, the Higley penny.
Higley used the cementation process for making steel and although steel was readily available from England it appears that Higley made his steel as a curiosity too see if he could make steel. At any rate Higley was lost at sea accompanying a load of copper ore to England, and several years passed before anyone made steel in the Colonies again.
Richard Smith was a promoter and businessman who came from England before the Revolution with the intention of making steel in the Colonies. He established his “Finery” in the part of Colebrook known as Robertsville where the ruins of his works is still to be found in the woods along Still River. It was here that his workers made steel in quantity from the pig iron smelted at Lakeville, Connecticut that at the time was called “Furnace Village.” The iron furnace there had been established by Ethan Allen who later became famous for the capture of Ft. Ticonderoga.
Eventually, this furnace became the property of Smith so that he had a vertical operation. The reason why the Finery was in Robertsville was because of the local wood supply to make charcoal. Pig iron was easier to ship then large quantities of wood or charcoal. The pig iron from Smith’s furnace was converted to wrought iron bars by forging with a drop hammer at Robertsville. Then these bars were placed in clay boxes along with powdered charcoal and subjected to a high heat for a week. The carbon was dissolved into the iron bars that were converted into steel by the dissolved carbon. This is the cementation process on a large scale. By all accounts this was an extremely high grade steel capable of being converted into cutlery and tools.
Allen had long since sold his furnace and removed himself from the Connecticut scene, and gone to New Connecticut as Vermont was known then. Smith eventually bought Allen’s furnace to supply his Robertsville works, and manufacture cast iron products at Lakeville. (Lakeville is part of the Town of Salisbury, Connecticut hence the name the Salisbury Iron District.)
When hostilities broke out between the British and the Colonialists, Smith was visiting in England and there he stayed for the duration of the Revolutionary War. Many of the Colonialists considered him to be a Tory, but there is no real evidence that this was so.
Jonathon Trumbull, as governor of the Connecticut Colony seized Smith’s works in the name of the committee of public safety, and placed the operation of a local iron master named Squire Samuel Forbes. He had to come out of retirement to undertake this task. Squire Forbes was the only man in the Colonies who could cast cannon that wouldn’t burst when fired. In the first six months of the war he cast over 850 tons of cannon, and during the war he cast over 850 cannon from four pounders to thirty pounders.
None of this would have been possible without tool steel from Smith’s Robertsville operation though. The steel produced there made the drill bits that made it possible for Forbes to bore the cannon. Smith’s steel proved to be George Washington’s secret weapon making the defeat of the British Army the most powerful in the world possible. It was also the birth of the American Steel Industry.
