Background
In some records, his name appears as Mason, and he was probably a member of a well-to-do family of that name in Sussex County, Virginia.
In some records, his name appears as Mason, and he was probably a member of a well-to-do family of that name in Sussex County, Virginia.
Meason took steps to secure his land in southwestern Pennsylvania within one year after purchase of the land from the proprietors had become legal. Since a definite boundary line between Pennsylvania and Virginia was not determined until October 1786, for a number of years the uncertainty of allegiance caused legal confusion in the Western country. Although Isaac Meason had bought his land from Pennsylvania, he was recommended in 1775 as a proper person to be added to the commission of the peace for Augusta County, Virginia. There is a reason to believe that in 1776 he served in the Continental Army under Colonel Anthony Wayne. In October 1779, Meason was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly from Westmoreland County. During the Revolution he was among those who wrote to the state government of the dangers threatening western settlements; in 1782 his brother-in-law, William Harrison, was captured, burned, and cut in pieces by the savages. In October 1783, Meason was elected by Westmoreland County to the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. The first recorded reference to iron ore in this section of Pennsylvania occurred in 1780 when Col. William Crawford, one of Meason's neighbors, surveyed a farm on the Monongahela "to include a bank of iron ore".
In 1816, despite those who urged him "not to impose upon the old gentleman, " one Thomas C. Lewis, a Welshman, persuaded Meason to finance a mill for puddling and rolling bar iron. Lewis, who had learned the process in Wales, had tried without avail for more than a year to convince Eastern iron masters that iron could be rolled into bars. Meason, by financing Lewis's project, contributed one more step to the development of the Western Pennsylvania iron and coal industry in which he had been the first to achieve success. When he died he left to his heirs over 20, 000 acres of the best coal land in Western Pennsylvania, in addition to Middleton Iron Works, Dunbar Furnace, Mount Vernon Furnace, Union Furnace, Maria Forge and Union Forge, toll ferries and bridges, gristmills, rolling mills, salt works, the town of New Haven, and lands in other parts of Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
On April 28, 1778, Thomas Gist swore that being a magistrate, in April 1772 he had "solemnized the wrights of Matrimony between Isaac Meason and Catharine Harrison, " whose father was Lawrence Harrison. Other witnesses said that at the time all parties, including Catharine, were required by Isaac Meason to swear "not to divulge said marriage. " Isaac and Catharine became the parents of two sons and two daughters.