58 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



stretch along from Mineville for nearly 2 miles to the north, 

 even crossing the line of the town of Moriah into Elizabethtown. 



History. The first of the ore bodies to be discovered was the 

 one which is now called the Cheever, but which when Professor 

 Emmons was preparing his report, 1836-42, was known as the 

 Walton or Old Crown Point vein [see Emmons's Report on the 

 Second District, p. 237]. Nevertheless the name Cheever appears 

 in Professor Beck's report on the Mineralogy of New York [p. 15]. 

 The Cheever had been worked for 50 years when Professor Emmons 

 visited it, and this would place its opening at 1785-90. The ore 

 beds at Mineville were known in 1835-40, but the largest of them, 

 as now revealed in the "21" mine (so named from the number of 

 the old land lot) was first opened in 1846. 1 It is evident that the 

 early mining industry was prompted by the call for ore for the 

 small blast furnaces which still remain in states of indifferent 

 preservation. Plate 3 is from a photograph of the old Colburn 

 furnace which was built in 1848, and which still stands about a 

 mile west of Moriah Center. Another one is represented by a pile 

 of collapsed masonry, at Fletcherville, also called "Seventy five" 

 a mile and a half north of Mineville. At Port Henry there was a 

 furnace at Cedar Point, even in Professor Emmons's time, and 

 this is the site of the large plant now in full blast. Twenty years 

 ago there were two other, blast furnaces called the Bay State, and 

 situated just west of the steamboat dock. The abundant slag 

 along the shore at this point came from them, but they have since 

 been torn down. 



The old bloomeries or forges were located where there was a 

 water power sufficient to run the blast and the trip hammer. But 

 for 25 years or so they have been extinct. In their day they con- 

 sumed an appreciable fraction of the output of those mines which 

 were low in phosphorus and sulfur. The ore was hauled many 

 miles to them. By 1890, except perhaps at Standish, in Clinton 

 county they had practically gone to the scrap pile. 



Topography. Lake Champlain stands at an altitude of almost 

 exactly 100 feet above tide. Over extended areas its bottom is 

 well below sea level, and in its deepest parts is more than 250 feet 

 lower than the surface of the ocean. Its western or New York 

 shore is marked by a series of spurs of the Adirondacks which 

 come down to the lake with a northeast trend, and either ending 

 abruptly at the water's edge or projecting into the lake itself, 



1 See Eng. & Min. Jour. May 26, 1906. 



