Before we start on our adventure, let’s watch one, a movie made by the BBC about El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold in the Amazon.
Sit back and watch the show in full-screen by clicking the small box on the extreme right side at the bottom of the player.
Significant current research on Terra Preta is conducted at Cornell University by a team headed by Dr. Johannes Lehmann.
In 2009, at a workshop on biochar at the Pony Farm in Temple, NH, Hugh McLaughlin gave some history and ideas about the actual formation of the Black Earth. First, most of it was not black. There was Terra Mulata, brown earth.
Hugh refers to the book, 1491 – New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. It is worth the read!
Dr. Hugh McLaughlin
Hugh McLaughlin, PhD, PE has a professional consulting practice in Chemical Engineering. He is an expert on the properties and production of chars, created by pyrolyzing biomass, and the subsequent conversion to activated carbons.
The Tri-State area where New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut border each other was the home of military ironworks for the Revolution, the Civil War, etc. The forests were stripped of trees for charcoal needed to produce iron. Quite a few iron furnaces have been reconstructed, but of the charcoal kilns these are the only ones I know of, reconstructed and left in nature in the hopes that they will be respected. In fact, I have mixed feelings about putting them up on the Internet and, as you might have noticed, I have been cagey about where they are located.
Charcoal Pits in the Northeast
Scattered through the woods in the Northeast are remains of other methods where charcoal was more commonly made during the colonial era.