So, you have a decent sized hunk of magnetite. You would have to take it to an iron plantation: the production of iron was typically not something done on a very small scale. There would be lots of labor needed to dig the ore, transport it, cut trees and controlled-burn them into charcoal, to run the bloomery furnaces ( around the clock), and to forge the slag-laden blooms and work them into wrought iron. It took equipment and buildings- perhaps water-powered tilt-hammers for forging the blooms, stone furnaces for firing. It took a lot of land, too: the process required huge amounts of charcoal, so many acres of forest were needed: the Neabsco ironworks in Virginia had 1,800 acres of its own, and bought wood from the owners of 20,000 acres nearby. The lowland Virginia plantations were somewhat lucky: boats could often be used to transport ore, charcoal, and supplies on rivers. But if there were no rivers, there'd be a need for a lot of wagons, on the notoriously poor roads.

It took about 25 man/days to produce a ton of iron. Ross' plantation south of the James River in Virginia produced 1,600 tons per year, so there were obviously at least 150 men laboring there. In the labor-scarce colonies, it is not surprising that iron plantations would therefore have to use enslaved, indentured servants, and convicts- and , from the notices of rewards for escaped workers, it's reasonable to suppose that the labor was very, very hard. You could bring your chunk of ore to the furnace. You likely would not want to work there, if you had a choice.

Likely you would buy your iron back in the form of a bar, something around four inches wide and six feet long, a half inch thick. But a big operation that was producing wrought iron might also have water-powered machinery for cutting it: while a gun barrel might need to be welded from a skelp three or feet long, and a half inch thick, nails and screws would be worked up from 1/4"x1/4" squares, and a slitting mill could provide all that.

Of course, you might also just buy screws: colonies were encouraged ( in theory, often even legally obliged) to send raw commodities home, and import finished goods in return. Screws were often imported. As were gun locks: specialist shops in England could make them more cheaply than individual gunsmiths in the colonies, and, like screws, a keg full of them was cost-effective to transport. Most Kentucky rifles have imported locks. But some manufacturing was still done: barrels were often welded from local iron by the gunsmiths- and depending on where the gunsmiths were located, they might be able to take them to a boring mill, where there were water-powered reamers to bore them out. That barrel blank could then be forged out, ground or filed, reamed further, worked up by the gunsmith to be a light smoothbore tube for a fowler, or a heavy octagon rifled tube for a rifle.

Scrap brass could be melted for casting the furniture, the buttplate, trigger guard. Or, if the customer wanted, silver, iron or steel. But the colonists were not a wealthy bunch, and judging from the surviving rifles, brass was usually the most cost effective for them, sometimes with some silver accents- like a thumbpiece on the wrist with the owner's initials.

Circa 1768, the style of the rifle would reflect the origins of the gunsmith and the taste of the community, usually a mixture of German, French and English. As there was a great deal of German immigration in the first half of the 18th c., German gunsmiths had really developed the light hunting rifle, and there were many German gunsmiths in the colonies, it's not surprising that in the few surviving early rifles there's a great deal of German style- likely, some of them are actually re-stocked German rifles. But the regional styles began to emerge soon after this, variations on the basic Kentucky Rifle model of a rifle that was long and slender, with a tapered and flared or "swamped" barrel, brass patchbox, and usually a sugar maple stock.

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Bridenbaugh, C. (2011). The Colonial Craftsman (Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History.). Dover Publications.

Brown, M. L. (1980). Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology 1492–1792 (First Edition). Smithsonian.

Gill, H. B. (1974). The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg research studies). Colonial Williamsburg Publications.

Iron In Colonial Virginia

Paskoff, P. (1977). Colonial Merchant-Manufacturers and Iron: A Study in Capital Transformation, 1725-1775. The Journal of Economic History, 37(1), 261-263. Retrieved June 7, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2119465