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Clapp-Griffith method, invented in England, was tried in 1885 in Pittsburgh. It was designed to produce good steel with a high phosphorus content. By 1886, there were eight Clapp-Griffith plants in operation in the United States—including the one at Cedar Point in Port Henry. Despite this alternative method, the Bessemer steel method remained dominant through the 1890s.

The Clapp-Griffith’s steel plant was intended to revolutionize the iron industry. This excerpt from BRADSTREET’S, A Journal of Trade, Finance, and Public Economy in 1885 describes the high hopes the iron industry had for the new steel-making process:

“There has been considerable interest taken in the Clapp-Griffith’s steel process of late. This has been caused by the probability that it will not only successfully antagonize the Bessemer steel process, but that it will revolutionize the whole iron trade. From eleven to fourteen Clapp-Griffith’s steel plants have already been licensed, and the significance of this is that but few puddlers will be needed, their work being done by machinery. The product is a steel very low in carbon “which can be worked and welded as easily as the softest iron.” Competent opinion has declared that this process will successfully rival the Bessemer process. One great advantage will be that of utilizing the high phosphorus ores of the Lake Superior region at better prices. The Bessemer ore men “will suffer” but the decrease of consumption of that variety will not equal the increased consumption of all. It will probably check the importation of iron ores. Iron men from the south and from the northwest have investigated the process and appear to regard it favorably. Its adoption will mean a genuine revolution. Ores high in phosphorus, heretofore of no use, will be available. Puddling will be largely done away with. Some considerable quantity of labor will be displaced, but in the long run, the greatest good of the greatest number will be subserved. In response to interviews by BRADSTREET’S of authorities among the iron and trades at Pittsburgh, telegraphic replies as to the prospects of the new process are as follows: “Authorities here say that Pittsburgh will not be slow to recognize the value of the improvement, which is considered superior to anything yet discovered in the iron line.”

“The Cedar Point Iron Company’s Furnace No. 1 at Port Henry, Essex County, NY.” By T.F. Witherbee, which appeared in Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, Volume 4, 1876, excerpt:

“The site selected for the furnace was, at the time of commencing working, October, 1872, entirely covered by navigable waters of Lake Champlain.  A coffer-dam was first built of cribs of round timber filled with stone, forming three sides, while the shore answered for the forth. Considerable excavating was done with a steam dredge; a hole being left for it to pass out. The opening was then built up, and the cribbing banked up with blue clay for the bottom of the lake, to render it water-tight and the dam pumped out; the remainder of the excavating being done by hand. All of the foundations, with the exception of the elevator tower, and fifteen feet of the east side of the hot blast, rest on the Potsdam sandstone, which forms the shore line, dipping into the lake at an angle of 15 degrees.”

View the grand homes of mine owners and mistresses on Spring Street. 

From History of the Iron Industry in Essex County By Frank S. Witherbee, 1906:

“This bed, the oldest in the town, is situated about one and a half miles north of the village of Port Henry. The knowledge of the existence of ore at this point has existed since the first settlement of the region. The late Alexander McKenzie, who was born in the town in 1785, remembered the existence of ore here in his early childhood; it cropped out on the surface of the ground to such an extent as to attract the attention of a casual observer. Ore is known to have been taken from the bed in 1804, but in small quantities, and the matter then attracted but little attention. In about the year

1820 the bed was leased to Charles Fisher, at a rent of two gross tons of bloom iron per annum; this iron was then worth about one hundred dollars a ton. Not long after this the title passed to one John Coates, to whom Dr. Abijah Cheever, as guardian of minor children, had loaned some funds. Dr. ‘. Cheever was subsequently forced to accept the property either in payment or as security for the debt. Dr. Cheever did not appreciate the almost priceless value of his-acquisition, nor did the community about him; for he pressed it upon the market at a merely nominal price, and finally sold it in the year 1838, to Horace Grey, of Boston, for $5,000. In 1840 Mr. Grey transferred his interest to the Port Henry Iron Company, from which he leased in 1846 the furnace property and the Cheever bed. In the fall of 1852 Benjamin T. Reed, of Boston, purchased the property of the Port Henry Iron Company (see history of that company), and in the next year transferred the ore bed to the Cheever Ore Bed Company, composed of B. T. Reed, Samuel Hooper, R. W.

Hooper, of Boston, and Joseph Tuckerman and Lucius Tuckerman, of New York city. From 1853 onward to 1884 the bed was vigorously worked, and it is estimated that during this period one and a half million tons of ore were taken from it. The ore was of great value and purity, needed no separating and worked into the best of iron. Following is its analysis: —

Proto and peroxide of iron .90.54

Phosphate of lime 3.80

Amphibole 2.80

Silicic acid 1,60

Pilanferous iron- 1.26

100.00

The main vein is fully half a mile in length and with an average width of of about ten feet; it is now considered as about exhausted.”