ABSTRACT
The W. H. Lancashire letters were written by two English immigrant brothers, Matthew Herbert and William Henry Lancashire. The first one, in this volume, was written by Matthew while he was working at the Principio Furnace, Cecil County, Maryland, to his wife and family in Nottingham. The Principio Furnace was Maryland’s first iron-works and dated back to 1719, with a joint-stock company formed in 1820 by a group of London investors. The furnaces were rebuilt and modernized by 1837, and by 1856 – a year after Lancashire’s first letter – the old cold blast system was replaced by a hot blast system, which burned the charcoal fuel more efficiently. During the Civil War, demand for iron products skyrocketed, and the owner of the furnace, George Price Whitaker, made more improvements to raise production. Lancashire writes in 1855 of the superior American diet: ‘we have meat 3 times a day and always new bread (mostly hot) we heat meat & Potatoes, bread’, and expresses his sympathy to his wife and children for their meagre diet. A Methodist, Lancashire assures his family that he has not taken up the tobacco habit, talks of the higher American wages (though he has not yet been paid) and the higher American prices. The next three letters were written by his brother, William, while he was a soldier in the Union Army, and they are included in the next volume. The lack of punctuation makes these letters a challenge to read, but the material in them makes the effort very much worth the effort.
