During the Civil War, iron was a highly prized commodity in the Confederacy, which relied on small rural ironworks to manufacture cannons, swords, and firearms. Ruben White first mined iron ore in this area in the 1780s, and by 1860 the Cranberry Iron Corporation operated a bloomer forge on Cranberry Creek. Jordan C. Hardin ran the mine, while his father, John Hardin, was the local postmaster. In a bloomer, burning charcoal melted iron from the ore, workers stirred and gathered the mass with an iron bar, carried it to the forge, hammered out impurities, and then hammered it into flat bars of iron. During the war, forty to sixty men worked at Cranberry mining ore and forging iron for the Confederacy. Once a month, the bar iron was loaded into a wagon, and Peter Hardin, a local slave, drove it down the mountain to Camp Vance near Morganton, where it was loaded on a train and transported to foundries throughout the South that produced munitions for the war effort. After the war, the property changed hands several times. Former Confederate Gen. Robert F. Hoke owned the operations for several years, and in 1873 he and his associates incorporated the Cranberry Iron and Coal Company. The mine was worked sporadically through the first half of the twentieth century.