The ore that fed the furnaces on the Buffalo River came out of a shallow open working about a mile away. In 1827 John McClish sold the land with the old ironworks on it to John Catron and John C. McLemore; Catron was sole owner by 1828, ran it as the Buffalo Iron Works, and went on to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. The panic of 1833 forced him out, and the works passed to his son John Catron junior and to George F. Napier. Napier's brother, Dr Elias Wills Napier, took it over when they got into difficulty, and in 1848 it went to his nephew William C. Napier, who gave it the name it kept. The Napiers give the place its name, though they came after Catron rather than before him, which the federal sign at the site gets backwards.
The ore is brown limonite, lying close enough to the surface to be dug rather than blasted, which is why the working is a broad scoop and not a shaft. The old hillside furnace was cold by 1880. A new stack, sixty feet high, was blown in half a mile away in February 1892; a railway reached it in 1894 and it was converted from charcoal to coke in 1897, and the village of Napier grew around it. What finished it was not the fuel but the ore: by then the Lake Superior ranges were shipping a far richer product than anything this valley held. The furnace was blown out for the last time in 1923 and dismantled for scrap about 1930. Napier is still a named place in Lewis County.
Getting there
35.4526, -87.4685
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