Information Sheet

 

 

R         Elgin, Robert L.

660                  “History of the Nova Scotia Iron Company,” n.d.

                                    One folder.

 

 

 

This is a history of the Nova Scotia Iron Company, 1880-1893, which operated mines and a hot blast furnace in Dent County, Missouri.  The furnace operated only intermittently from 1881 to 1884.

 

The Nova Scotia Iron Company was incorporated in 1880 by investors from St. Louis who had been previously associated in the Scotia Iron Company in Crawford County, Missouri.  When Scotia Furnace went out of blast in 1880, the machinery was shipped to Nova Scotia where a new furnace was put into blast in 1881.  Said to have been the largest modern hot blast, charcoal iron furnace of its day, Nova Scotia featured an all-steel, bell top furnace with a daily capacity of 100 tons.  Pigs were smelted from iron ore obtained first from the Nova Scotia mine (known formerly as the Barksdale Bank), then the Red Hill, Riverside, and Stephens-Woodside mines.  Plagued by transportation problems and dwindling sources of iron ore, Nova Scotia operated only intermit­tently to 1884.  After failed attempts to induce the Frisco railroad to extend its tracks from Salem to the furnace, the plant was abandoned and the machinery was shipped to Paducah, Kentucky, in 1888.  The corporation was dissolved in 1893.  The Nova Scotia site is currently part of the Mark Twain National Forest.

 

The history, written largely from newspaper sources in Dent and Crawford counties  and iron trade journals, was prepared for the Mark Twain National Forest.  The author is the County Sur­veyor of Phelps County, Missouri, and an authority on charcoal iron furnaces in Missouri.  In­cluded with the history are plats of the company’s landholdings in Dent County and copies of El­gin’s research notes.

 

 

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