A legacy of pollution
In 1810, a team of surveyors scouting a military road in St. Lawrence County noted a point where the needles on their compass began to tremble in bizarre fashion. Thirty years later, geologist Ebenezer Emmons explained why. A thick slab of valuable magnetic iron ore, up to 80 percent pure, appeared above the ground, stretching for two and a half miles just east of present-day Star Lake.
Throughout the century, many men fantasized about the potential profit represented by this wilderness deposit, but it wasn’t until 1887 that Pennsylvania oilman Byron David Benson opened a mine. Still, while the vein was rich by Adirondack standards, it was chicken scratch compared with the emerging Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and so the Benson Mines operated in fits and starts until shutting down at the end of
