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Thanks, Mr. Link! That is exactly what I needed!

The US Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors publication "Transportation on the Great Lakes: Series 1" (which was published in at least three editions-1926, 1930 and 1937) has data on Lake Superior ore shipments back to 1855. Although that is not the entire Great Lakes, I believe that Lake Superior provided the vast majority of ore movements in the earlier years.

Here is a link to the page with detailed data in the 1937 edition on the Hathi Trust website. The entire 40 plus page chapter on iron ore is worth glancing at. The earlier editions contain different data, including detailed statistics of shipments from various mines.


https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.3901507 ... 803833-364

Does anyone know of any reliable source to obtain iron ore shipments on the Great Lakes during the 1800s? It looks like many such tables of information only go back to 1900. I'm primarily interested in the 1860-1899 timeframe.