Fayette: Company Store

Fayette's charcoal blast was a long-obsolete technology when it was built in 1877; the British iron industry had largely abandoned it a century before, and the steel industry's Bessemer/Kelly patent dispute had been settled for nearly a decade. I set out to research why Jackson Mining invested in old technology for my senior paper at Macalester, only to discover that Maria Quinlan Leiby, a friend from my bicycling days, had already written that paper. It's a surprisingly small world.