Manufacturing, Mining, and Railroad Items

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At the Wilder Works, in East Tennessee, good iron is now being made ont of raw coal and raw ore. ColonelWilderrecentlysaid: "At the Holidays-burg mines, in Pennsylvania, they dig 250 feet for a vein of fossilif erous ore only seven to thirteen inches thick, and here we have it above ground from three to fifteen feet thick. It costs in Pittsburgh more for the limestone than it costs us here for all the materials to make the iron." It is reported that there are at present one hundred and seventy-eight different places fn San Francisco where cigars are made, and about one thousand persons are engaged in the business. These establishments turned out 50,000,000 cigars the past year. Aboutfiftyfactoriesare exclusivelycontrolled by Americans, and about one hundred are managed by Chinamen. The to bacco plantations in the southern portion of the State promise heavy and fine crops this year. An old Indian silvermine has been f oundin Indiana. Over one of the furnaces was found a tree that had attained a diameter of fifteen inches, showing the great antiquity of the mine. A quantity of fine metal was found at the bottom of one ofthe furnaces. Since the last "shaking up" in San Francisco, the mechanics of that city have turned their attention to the contrivance of earthquake proof chim -neys for the large factories. An immense iron smoke stack, forty feet high, eight feet in diameter, has just been raised upon a sugar refinery, the roof of which is sixty feet from the ground. The Bank of California, in San Francisco, is said to employ Chinamen in half dozen gangs to count silver coins. They are said to possess marvelous skill in detecting spurious coins or tliose of light weight. The land sales of the Hannibaland St. Joseph Railroad Company during the past year amounted to over million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A Pennsylvania firm have bought the Eoup's Valley Iron Works, and propose to invest $500,000 in them. Forty whiskey distilleries in the sixth district, Kentucky, each use three hundred bushels of corn per day. The total amount used by the distilleries in the district is estimated at three million bushels per annum. The tobacco sales at Paducah, Kentucky, during the last week were the heaviest ever known there. The rubber works at Sandy Hook, Newtown, have received an order for a rubber belt three hundred feet long and four feet broad. Ii the works can turn it out, it will be the largest rubber belt ever made. The Hoosac Valley Mills, at Pownal, Vermont, manufactured thirtyflve thousand yards of cassknere during the twenty-four working days of February. The largest single nugget ever found in any part of the world, weighing twenty-eight pounds of pure gold, was found in Cabarras county, North Carolina, inl803. The St. Louis Republican says, that the Iron Mountain Railroad brings into that city more car loads of freight than any road terminating there. The new iron used on the Iron Mountain Railroad is of the T pattern with fish joints and weighs fifty-six pounds to the yard. A machine shop in Lowell is building a lathe that will weigh seventy tuns when completed. The snow along the lineof theGrandTrunk Railway, in Maine, is in many places higher than the tops of the cars. The boot and shoe manufacture is everywhere progressing with the utmost briskness. The snow fallin Montreal during the month of February is said to have been seventy-three inches. Oregon has twenty-one quartz mills in operation, Nevada has a million and a quartermulberry trees;

Scientific American Magazine Vol 20 Issue 13This article was published with the title “Manufacturing, Mining, and Railroad Items” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 20 No. 13 (), p. 203
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican03271869-203b

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