Isaac Tyson Jr. (1792–1861) was a Quaker businessman from Baltimore, Maryland, who held a virtual monopoly on world supplies of chromium minerals during the mid-19th century and a very successful entrepreneur and industrialist.
The sight of a piece of chromite being used to prop a barrel at a Bel Air market in Harford County, Maryland, led him to investigate its source.
He personally supervised the construction and operation of six small furnaces nearby in 1833 and 1834, hoping to introduce hot blast techniques, using hard anthracite coal, to refining copper from the refractory pyrrhotite ores of the deposit.
The expansion into pigment production helped cushion the shock when chromite deposits were discovered in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in 1848 and began to supplant U.S. chromium ores.
He continued iron and copper explorations, opening the Springfield Mine for those two metals in Sykesville, Maryland in southern Carroll County, just west of Bare Hills in 1849.