A Look Back: The 1752 Pembroke Town Meeting Considers the Question of Bog Iron

An Excerpt from My Doctoral Dissertation, As We Approach Town Meeting Season

[Readers, since we are in Town Meeting season, I will post here an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation in History, The Enduring Commons: Ecology, Politics, and Economic Life in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1691-1815 (Univ. of Michigan, 2016), regarding the efforts by 18th century Town Meetings in Pembroke to regulate the mining of Town commons – in this case, bog iron, a fascinating and somewhat lesser known aspect of the ecology and history of our region. – Ed. ]

  The early Town Meetings of the Towns of our region were essentially and profoundly concerned with the regulation of common natural resources, from migratory fish to oyster shells, firewood to salt-meadows, and beyond. In the early 1750s, for the first time in the Pembroke Town Records, the regulation of the Town's supplies of bog iron ore came increasingly to occupy the attention of the Town Meeting. 

( An 1831 Map of Pembroke; photo credit — Digital Commonwealth. ) 

    Bog iron is a form of iron ore that was valuable to iron-working peoples in the middle latitudes of Eurasia and America. The phenomenon occurs in places with the right concatenation of geophysical factors: underlying bedrock composition, levels of precipitation, and, typically, the presence of glaciation during the last Ice Age. When and where these three factors combine in the correct fashion, physical and chemical weathering of underlying rocks and soils, both by air and by precipitation, dissolve ferrous elements in the local minerals; these are then washed, along with non-ferrous sediment, into local swamps, bogs, and glacially-carved lakes and ponds.