Isaac Tyson

Who was Isaac Tyson?

Isaac Tyson, Jr. was a Quaker businessman from Baltimore, Maryland, who held a virtual monopoly on world supplies of chromium minerals during the mid-19th century.

The son of Baltimore flour merchant Jesse Tyson and his wife Margaret, Tyson studied geology, mineralogy, and chemistry in France, skills which he would use to great advantages during his industrial career.

He first began mining chromite on his farm at Bare Hills some time after 1808. The sight of a piece of chromite being used to prop a barrel at a Bel Air market led him to investigate its source. Tyson was among the first to make the connection between the occurrence of chromite and serpentine barrens, areas of sparse vegetation on metal-rich and inhospitable serpentine deposits. One of these was Soldiers Delight, near Owings Mills. Tyson began mining chromite here in 1827. He commenced buying up serpentine barrens wherever he could find them. The primary belt extended from Maryland into the southern counties of Pennsylvania, including the Nottingham serpentine barrens and the Wood Farm in Lancaster County, which would become the world's largest single chromite mining site during his ownership. Having bought up all the significant chromite sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, Tyson found himself with a world monopoly on chromite as the original chromium sources in Siberia petered out.