Rural Capitalism in Iron Country: Staffing a Forest Factory, 1808–1815

Thomas M. Doerflinger

HERE come Jacob Emons and Joseph Camp, both "very drunk." Perched on four-horse wagons, they are carting loads of corn to Martha Furnace from a sloop docked in New Jersey's Wading River. Both are employed by the ironworks, where they live and work. Emons has driven a team for the furnace virtually every working day since being hired as a carter three years earlier. Across the flat sandy expanses of south Jersey's pinelands, Emons has hauled everything from logs, bricks, sand, corn, and clay to pig iron, iron ore, and cast iron "holloware" such as kettles and stoves. Like Emons, Camp specializes as a teamster at Martha, although for six months he worked at Atsion Furnace, about twelve miles distant, as a furnace tender rather than a teamster.1

1

What made Emons and Camp unusual in the social and economic fabric of early America was that they were employees--employees, moreover, of a large industrial complex that was owned by capitalists, run by a professional manager, and tightly linked to the market economy. They consumed food and supplies that were shipped to Martha Furnace from Philadelphia and produced iron that might ultimately be used in a New York workshop or on a Louisiana plantation. In a land of independent farmers and artisans, ironworks represented a distinctive, accelerated path to rural economic development. Capitalism, it has been widely argued, came to the countryside subtly and by degrees, almost insensibly over generations, as farmers and craftsmen were drawn into an increasingly intimate engagement with the market. Even the New England farmer who was making shoes or brooms for a Boston merchant in the early nineteenth century was far from dependent on him. In the Connecticut River Valley it was not until the 1830s and 1840s that sizable factories, employing fifty or more, became common.2

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