Iron smelting furnaces and iron artifacts were found by J.V. Howe in 1946 in the Roanoke River valley near Clarksville, Va. These Virginia furnaces and artifacts are similar to those found by amateur investigators in Ohio. Clarksville, just north of the North Carolina border, is near Bugs Island Lake, part of a system of flood control lakes and dams on the Roanoke River and its tributaries.
Arlington Mallery, who discovered the Ohio pit iron furnaces, reports on Howe's Virginia furnaces in a chapter in The Rediscovery of Lost America, a 1979 rewrite of his 1951 book, Lost America. (The more recent book is a posthumous collaboration with Mary Roberts Harrison.) Howe is described as a "famous small arms expert" who in retirement in the late 1940's made a hobby of searching for Indian artifacts on his own estate, near the Bugs Island Lake dam site, and elsewhere.
This led him to eventually discover 16 sites within a sixty-mile radius from his home where he found iron furnaces, iron artifacts and iron slag, in various combinations. No site-by-site list of finds is available, but several sites where structural remains of furnaces were found are mentioned by Mallery.
Bog iron ore is plentiful in this region around Clarksville, according to Howe, and to Mallery, who visited Howe and inspected some of Howe's Virginia furnace sites in March,1949.
In their interpretations of evidence found at the Howe sites, both Howe and Mallery make the wild suggestion that the iron smelters and associated artifacts might be 10,000 to 13,000 years old because of their close association with Folsom spear points. Mallery says in his book that the Howe iron and iron tools "were found in close association with ancient stone tools, arrowheads and spearheads on all of the sites of discovery."
However, close physical association of artifacts at an archaeological site often represents merely a mixing of the old and the new. For instance, the mound pit iron furnaces of the Deer Creek valley in Ohio, investigated by Mallery and others, yielded a mix of prehistoric, and what seemed to be historic, artifacts. This is because the prehistoric mounds seem to have been used for furnaces because they were convenient, pre-existing elevations for pit furnaces (see "Ohio's Presumed Historic Furnaces" this web site).
Although Mallery's conclusions concerning the archaeology of the Howe sites are suspect because of his haphazard methodology, I have found that he is fairly reliable evaluating metallurgical evidence. So I am confident that the Clarksville area of Virginia is worthy of further investigation for whatever evidence of mysterious iron making may remain. The extent of iron making in this area is indicated where Mallery reports in The Rediscovery of Lost America that Howe collected about 400 pounds of iron artifacts from his furnace sites, including nails, rivets, chisels and "thousands of pieces of iron slag."
One Howe site described by Mallery at a place called "Oak Hill," located on high ground overlooking (apparently) the Roanoke River valley, was a shallow oval pit seven feet long and five feet wide. No measurement of its depth is given. However, Mallery states that the Oak Hill furnace was originally a stone wall shaft, and that the stones were removed for use as headstones for graves in a slave cemetery nearby.
A sketch of the shallow pit is included. Its length verses depth is 2.25 to 0.50 (measured in inches directly from the page of Mallery's book). If accurate, such dimensions suggest the pit is indeed only what's left of a furnace bottom. Otherwise, the Oak Hill pit would not have been deep enough for proper smelting conditions to exist in the furnace. And the presence of smelting debris at the site strongly suggests this was the remains of a much deeper furnace. Our Lynn Acres furnace in Ohio, at its highest intact level was (in feet) a 10 x 9 oval, and 9 deep.
This suggests Howe's Oak Hill furnace should have been at least five feet deep, and strongly backs up the story about the furnace's wall stones being removed for use at the cemetery. So far, the stone shaft construction of a small iron smelting furnace is unique to Virginia; none of Ohio's mysterious iron furnaces we've investigated were above-ground except for those built into mounds. Stone shaft furnaces on the same scale as the Oak Hill furnace were, however, common in ancient times in Europe. The Romans made wide use of such iron furnaces.
Readers of Mallery's chapter on the Virginia furnaces were given more authority for their existence than just what he and Howe had reported. We are also told that Frank H.H. Roberts, a Smithsonian Institution archaeologist, was working in the Clarksville area to assess the archaeological impact of the Bugs Island dam and reservoir then under construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He quotes a news story in the Richmond, Va. Times-Dispatch, Nov. 12, 1949, in which Roberts reports finding "iron nails, iron slag and iron fragments."
Archaeologist Roberts reportedly sent the nails, slag and iron fragments he found near the site of the Bugs Island dam to the Smithsonian. Also, both Howe and Mallery reportedly submitted materials associated with iron smelting at the Howe sites to the Smithsonian.
A professor of metallurgy is also quoted in Mallery's chapter on the Virginia furnaces. Apparently invited to Virginia by Mallery, R.W. Breckenridge of Iowa State University examined what he recognized as pieces of "old style wrought iron" and "dirty steel" in the Howe collection. Breckenridge also reported finding furnace slag under the roots of a tree estimated to be "300 or more years old" and iron, nails and "partially formed tools" uncovered at several of the Howe sites.
Mallery reports at the end of this chapter that Howe's furnace sites in Virginia were "for the most part" lost when the lake formed behind the Bugs Island Dam in 1952. However, if my experience and that of my associates in Ohio is any guide, there is good reason to believe that Howe-type furnaces may yet exist in Virginia in the Clarksville area, awaiting discovery or re-discovery.
When I began working with David Orr in 1990 to find evidence to solve the mystery of Ohio's pit furnaces, we knew of only one new site. That was in a Ross County, Ohio field where Orr discovered the unusual burned material (see Archaeo-Pyrogenics Society at link) which led us to establish our archaeological partnership. But before 1992 was past, we found an excavated our Lynn Acres site and had learned of the existence of many more furnace sites. If interested people in south central Virginia could become familiar with the diagnostic artifacts and the type of terrain where furnaces would be located, perhaps more Virginia furnaces can be found.
Go To Ohio's 'Historic' Furnaces