200 



Notice of Peter Hasenclever. 



manifesting at the very outset a rashness and want of 

 calculation, through which the capital at his disposal might 

 be imperiled and sunk, from many natural yet unexpected 

 causes. 



Yet such was the energy of this sanguine man that he 

 actually made iron at a decayed iron works by the month 

 of November, 1764, and had purchased in New York and 

 New Jersey 50,000 acres of land for his purposes, on the 

 account of his company In August, 1765, he purchased 

 a ship in New York, which he loaded for London, with 

 iron, furs, timber, and potash to the amount of five hogs- 

 heads. The iron and the potash had been manufactured 

 by the company's workmen. 



Within a year from November, 1764, he had transported 

 535 persons, including their wives and children, from 

 Germany, as miners, carpenters and laborers : and his 

 partners in London also wrote to him that "it was univer- 

 sally allowed by the trade that his iron was the best drawn 

 which had ever made its appearance on the London mar- 

 ket from America." 



At the end of the next year, 1766, he had in operation 

 four furnaces and seven forges in New Jersey and New 

 York, and a pot and pearl ash manufactory on the Mo- 

 hawk river, and had built stores, work-shops and dwelling 

 houses to the number of 235, besides dams for thirteen 

 mill ponds and ten bridges, with many miles of roads. 



These furnaces were on the Pequonnock river at Char- 

 lottenburg, and Kingwood and Long Pond in Bergen and 

 Morris counties, New Jersey, and at Haverstraw, Orange 

 county, New York, all of them being near the line of the 

 Erie railroad as it is now laid out ; and one was at 

 Cortland, in Westchester county. Several of the mines 

 which he then opened, and upon which he spent large sums 

 of money in developing them, are still worked, and are 

 greatly productive. He examined in all fifty-three mines, 

 of which he asserted that only seven proved to yield good 

 ore. 



