Mallery Declares Vikings Used Ohio Furnaces

Columbus Citizen, Columbus, Ohio
November 6, 1949
By Douglas Smith, Citizen Washington Bureau

“Ancient iron implements unearthed in Ross County are more than 600 years old and prove that a metal age civilization – of Scandinavian origin – existed in Ohio long before Columbus came to America, a scientist declared Saturday.” (Mallery was more properly a metallurgist and industrial engineer).

A.H. Mallery, who has made an extensive search of the stone-walled Spruce Hill “fortress” near Bourneville last year, made this announcement after finding that ancient slag from a more recent discovery in Virginia was almost identical with slag found at Spruce Hill. The Virginia material at first was thought to be fragments of an ancient meteor.

Actually this iron slag is the residue from smelted metal and is found only in the refuse piles of ancient hearth-pit furnaces, Mallery said. He found remains of these furnaces in his Ohio excavations which were almost identical with these found in all other areas settled by the Vikings.

All smelting furnaces of the American Colonial period were of another type and articles which they made have been found to be substantially different in composition from the articles he found in the Ohio and Virginia Viking excavations, Mallery said. Those found in Ohio, for example, are very different in shape from those found at Jamestown, the early Virginia settlement.

His knowledge of a metals – he is an engineer who took up archaeology as a hobby, enabled Mallery to realize the value of his significant discoveries in Ohio. When he came across the first iron shovel, it was of such a regular shape that he laid it aside, thinking it might have been left by some of the earlier researchers, diging having taken place in Ross County intermittently for decades. But upon examining it carefully, he saw it was made by a method not used in either Colonial or modern times.

Mallery sent the shovels to Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus which found they were made of low-grade iron ore by a low-temperature welding process known as “cladding.” Two sheets were laid together while hot and hammered together, leaving a space at the top for the insertion of the handle.

These Viking founders of the Ohio iron industry used “bog ore,” which still exists in various low lying areas in Ohio and elsewhere, and contains so little iron that modern-day industry considers it not worth using. But they were able to make shovels, hoes, nails, iron bars and other useful articles from it.

An even wider variety of iron articles was unearthed at the Clarksville, Va. site including tools, chisels, clinch nails, boat spikes, caulking irons, dies for nails and nail heads. The round boat rivets with washers, called “klinknagel,” are particularly significant to Mallery, because they are similar to those found in Norse ruins in Greenland, Labrador and Scandinavia and Mallery himself dug up a number of them in Newfoundland. All colonial American nails, of which thousands exist, have rectangular shanks, not round ones.

More evidence cited by Mallery that the Norsemen inhabited Ohio is his discovery of a typical Viking two-chambered grave with the traditional “runestone” marking the mound. These have been found in all the northern areas across which historians agree were settled by the Vikings.”

Mallery theorizes that the Norsemen penetrated far deeper into American than traditional history concedes to have been the case. He places there Ohio existence as about 1050 A.D. to 1400. He thinks the “Black Death,” the bubonic plague which spread all over Europe between 1350 and1400, was carried to their American settlements, and either destroyed them or so reduced them that other inhabitants were able to drive them away.

Mallery has had laboratory analysis of slag made by ten different furnaces in Ohio and Virginia, and has a number of articles besides iron fragments. He declares his findings are final proof that traditional archaeologists have been wrong in their belief that iron never was made in America before the Columbian era. They have believed that the many iron tools such as Mallery had found were made of iron deposits by meteors or brought from Europe after Columbus’ time. Chemical analysis had determined positively that this iron this iron was not of meteoric origin, he says.

Mallery is a New Yorker and an industrial and structural engineer by profession. But for many years he pursued archaeology as a hobby, and has devoted all of his time to it since being retired from the Army at the end of World War II. He was a captain in the Army engineers and was wounded in New Guinea.

(Author William Conner's note: the "runestone" mentioned in this newspaper article was actually a practical joke and the joker was Tom Porter of Chillicothe, a collecter of artifacts. The "TEP" carved on the stone were Porter's initials.)