446 [May 3, 
Lesley.] 
The Furnace stands in the gap which the Nolichuckee makes through 
the last range of mountains on its way out from the North Carolina High- 
lands to the Great Limestone Valley of East Tennessee. A double rib 
of massive sandrock here forms a natural dam and mill-race, affording 
unlimited water-power, protected by projecting fragments of the sand- 
rock outcrop from the most violent freshets. It is a scene of rare beauty, 
and a remarkably favorable location for any kind of industry requiring 
power. A broad terrace affords ample room for several furnaces and their 
dependent outworks, a village, mills of different kinds, and, in fact, for a 
Rolling Mill of the first class. 
At present there stands here one Furnace, of small size, making 61 (six 
and a quarter) tons of metal per day at the time of my visit, a saw mill, 
an ochre mill, a village, store, church, and Superintendent’s mansion. 
A rope-ferry communicates with the State Road on the opposite shore. 
Jonesborough—the capital of the county, and oldest settlement in the 
State, on the Hast Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad, 82 miles 
from Bristol, 98 from Knoxville, 210 from Chattanooga, 236 from Lynch- 
burg, 440 from Norfolk, and 391 from Richmond—is eight (8) miles 
distant from the furnace by this State Road. <A railway could be made 
without difficulty over these eight miles, along smooth yales of limestone 
land, which head up towards Jonesborough. My barometer along the 
State Road gave me 290, 300 and 340 feet as the summit elevations above 
the river at the ferry. The intervals were from 50 to 100 feet lower. 
Railroad grade at Jonesborough was something under 200 feet above the 
ferry. A line might be located with maximum gradients of 50 feet to 
the mile, and with little or no cutting and filling, except for the first half 
mile below the furnace in the gap. Ten or twelve thousand dollars a 
mile ought to be quite sufficient to build the road. The bridge at the 
Furnace would be 200 feet long, but would need no piers, nor abutments: 
these being provided by nature in the shape of colossal sandrock outcrops 
rising fifty feet above the river bed. 
The metal made at the Furnace goes chiefly to the Tredegar Works at 
Richmond, 400 miles from the Furnace, costing $3.25 a ton to haul to Jones- 
borough, in the present state of the roads. In dry seasons, the limestone 
roads become smooth and hard. 
Up the river to the south and east, locked in among hills of irregular 
trend, steep slopes, and bluffs of crumbling rock, from 600 to 1,000 feet 
high, lie two limestones coves: Bompas Cove, drained by Bompas Creek, 
flowing north into the river at the Furnace washing ground, two miles 
from the works ; and Greasy Cove, drained by streams flowing southwest- 
ward to the river, and about six miles from the works. 
Bompas Cove is an oval valley three or four miles long, by one and a- 
half wide at its widest part, surrounded by mountains about a thousand 
feet high, on the inner slopes of which rest terraces or hill-spurs of 
decomposed limestone (Lower Silurian) holding masses of brown hematite 
iron ore of two varieties; the lower series (and outer, or closer up to the 
