An extreme example of how history can go wrong is furnished by the work of Ralph C. Meima who wrote a booklet entitled " Spotswood's Iron ", which was published in 1993. In the preface, he says that Alexander Spotswood erected Tubal furnace in or before 1715, an idea that harks back to Willis Kemper in 1898. Such a claim ignores the statement of Spotswood made in 1716 that the Germans had done no work for him in the two years they had been here. It also ignores the statement of Lt. Gov. Drysdale, made in 1723, which implies the furnace was newly built.
I wrote to Mr. Meima and highlighted the several things he said which were at variance with original documents. His reply as much as admitted that he had done no original research but he had copied statements from a trade journal. As we have been seeing, many erroneous statements were floating around and an article for a trade journal could have picked up any number of these errors. Apparently, Mr. Meima added a few of his own.
Mr. Meima was very careless in his quotations. He shows the picture of Germanna drawn by C. H. Huffman, saying it was drawn from a description by John Fontaine, who visited the site in 1714. Obviously he had not read Fontaine's account, a basic book for understanding Germanna. Mr. Meima also attributes the claim of a furnace in or before 1715 to Spotswood who never made any such statement.
Mr. Meima makes the claim for authenticity (in his letter to me) from an endorsement by the chief historian of the National Park Service.
The mention of an " 85,000-acre iron empire " shows a lack of understanding of Spotswood's other economic interests, which, until about 1730, were more important than iron. The claim that Spotswood discovered iron ore (shades of Kemper) while exploring in the west is entirely unproven.
A claim, that I have never seen anyone else make nor is there any evidence in the record, was that Spotswood wrote to the Lord Commissioners in London and asked that workmen and materials be sent to Virginia to begin an iron industry. This statement is simply false and takes only a few pages of reading in Spotswood's letters to see that it is false.
The statement that Spotswood led the Germans to Germanna in 1713 is obviously false. Another gross error is that Palatine German iron workers replaced the first comers who migrated to Fauquier County near Winchester to start an iron works of their own. Germanna students ought to be able to find five errors in this one statement.
There is an obvious lesson from this. Don't write your history or genealogy by copying. Doing so only creates more errors. Do your own research. Consult the original records.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.