s
sent over and men were set to work to operate it. But the difficulties
proved too great and ere long the attempt had to be abandoned.

The Company had no idea of relinquishing permanently its quest for
staple commodities, however, and soon a new and far more ambitious
project was set on foot for extracting the ore. The spot selected was at
Falling Creek, in the present county of Chesterfield, a few miles below
the rapids of the James river. George Sandys had noted with satisfaction
some years before that the place was in every respect suited for iron
smelting, for in close proximity to the ore was wood in abundance,
stones for the construction of the furnace and deep water for
transportation. To him it seemed that nature itself had selected the
site and endowed it with every facility which the enterprise could
require.[1-15] Here the London Company spent from L4,000 to L5,000 in a
supreme effort to make their colony answer in some degree the
expectations which had been placed in it. A Captain Blewit, with no less
than 80 men, was sent over to construct the works, upon which, they
declared, were fixed the eyes of "God, Angels and men." But Blewit soon
succumbed to one of the deadly epidemics which yearly swept over the
little colony, and a Mr. John Berkeley, accompanied by 20 experienced
workers, came over to take his place.

At first things seem to have gone well with this ambitious venture. Soon
the Virginia forests were resounding to the whir of the axe and the
crash of falling trees, to the exclamations of scores of busy men as
they extracted the ore, built their furnace and began the work of
smelting. Operations had progressed so far that it was confidently
predicted that soon large quantities of pig iron would be leaving the
James for England, when an unexpected disaster put an abrupt end to the
enterprise. In the terrible massacre of 1622, when the implacable
Opechancanough attempted at one stroke to rid the country of its white
invaders, the little industrial settlement at Falling Creek was
completely destroyed. The furnace was ruined, the machinery thrown into
the river, the workmen butchered. This project, which had absorbed so
much of the attention and resources of the Company, is said to have
yielded only a shovel, a pair of tongs and one bar of iron.[1-16]

The history of the attempts to establish glass works in Virginia is also
a story of wasted energy and money, of final failure. The Dutch and
Polish