Union City's early iron furnace

Michigan iron is an Upper Peninsula story — the Marquette Range, ore boats, mining towns up north. Except the first batch may have been poured a couple hundred miles south, in a furnace at Union City, before any of that got going.

In 1847 a group of local investors chartered the Union City Iron Company and bet on the ground under their feet. Southern Michigan’s wet lowlands hold bog iron — a soft, low-grade ore that forms in swamps and marshy ground, rusty stuff you can practically dig with a shovel. That spring their furnace ran it and produced iron that, by the surviving accounts, was reportedly the first ever smelted from Michigan ore. A real first, and it happened in the wrong corner of the state for the legend.

The trouble was the ore itself. Bog iron carries too little metal to pay for the work of smelting it, and the great U.P. ranges that would make Michigan famous were not yet opened or connected to shipping. So the company could not earn a living turning out raw pig iron — the rough cast blocks that come straight off a furnace. Rather than fold, the operation read its own neighborhood: this was farm country, and farms needed iron in a finished, useful shape. Within a few years the furnace was making plows.

It is a tidy little parable. A business chases a grand “first,” discovers the economics will not hold, and survives by making the dull, necessary thing the people next door actually want to buy. The headline is the first Michigan iron; the quiet ending is a shed full of plowshares.