03/18/01

Phebe didn’t bring up the subject this morning of me falling asleep on the couch. I’m sure she was wondering why I didn’t stay with her, but she wasn‘t pressing me to say. She just tried to flatter me with a bunch of compliments. Said she noticed I lost a lot of weight, that all those months in the cold trailer eating oatmeal seemed to do some good. She also said she was impressed with my knowledge of the Revolutionary War used in my novel. Yeah, if only the novel existed. In reality it was all information I had heard from Percy, but how was she going to know that.

Yeah, the Iron Act was a big factor in the Revolutionary War, I regurgitated. I thought for sure Phebe would be bored out of her mind, but she was listening intently. I think it was enacted in 1750. The British had depleted much of their forests by then and relied on their colonies to supply pig iron to make finished metal products in England. Pig Iron is sort of the raw unfinished iron that comes out of the ore when you heat it up. You need a whole lot of wood energy to produce it. The finished metal products come from pounding and shaping the pig iron in a forge. The British wouldn’t allow that pounding and shaping process to take place here, you see, because they had factories all set up in England they wanted to keep supplied. They also wanted to profit from selling the finished goods back to the colonists and tax it as an import item. But the temptation was great for an iron mine owner here in this area to take some of the pig iron they were producing and take the next step in manufacturing in defiance of the law. Over in Bellvale the British destroyed a forge, and when the war broke out, most of the people in the neighborhood joined the rebellion as they had remembered what happened to their forge. It made the difference in keeping the iron mining region in the hands of the Continental Army. The people might have stayed loyal otherwise.

That’s good, Phebe said, but I hope you don’t sound like a professor like that in the novel.