Читать книгу The History of Mining - Michael Coulson - Страница 43

As with Latin America, the lure of North America for many explorers was the possibility of finding precious metals, but in this respect they were largely unlucky as in due course we know that gold was found out west, and in the east it was found over the Canadian border in central Ontario and in Quebec. It was copper that unsurprisingly kept on turning up – in Connecticut in 1707, in New Jersey in 1719 and again in New Jersey in 1750.

In colonial times metal discovered in the American colonies was usually shipped back to the UK if it needed smelting, which made for sometimes unpredictable economics. After independence one of the earlier copper mining and smelting complexes was established in Vermont in 1820 and in 1853 the Vermont Copper Mining Company was incorporated. It became one of the primary sources of copper for American users until the discoveries in Michigan set off a string of major discoveries across the Midwest, which we will come to later.