#231 FRENCH CREEK STATE PARK,ELVERSON PA

We visited a furnace in Pennsylvania called Hopewell. It operated for about a hundred years ending in 1880. Initially, they used slave labor but in 1830 that ended at this furnace. They made a lot of iron products here including a lot of potbelly stoves. In 1830 they became what we would have hoped for the whole country. Men and women, Native and Africans all worked here side by side, made the same wage, lived together, and had no problems. I was very impressed. We can’t even do that in this era and it wasn’t like this hardly anywhere else.

This scene was on the road towards the furnace. I saw those lichen-covered rocks and wondered if that would make a nice picture looking at the leaves.

Funny thing how you never even have heard the word furnace, don't know what a furnace is, then the next week you know everything about them.

I knew that Pittsburgh made a lot of steel but this technology was many years before steel became a thing. This place is where and how it all got started.

These furnaces we're a very large stack of stonework with a hollow center. They would place the raw materials used to make iron inside plugged at the bottom. Iron ore and just all kinds of materials in a certain sequence were packed in. Next, they create a fire on top using charcoal to 1200 degrees or something for a day. When it was ready somebody would tap a pour spout with an ax and the liquid metal would flow into the forms that they had created. At Hopewell, they made things like wood stove handles and hardware.

They had a pretty cool video showing the elaborate method of making charcoal. I asked myself what is charcoal and why would you make it.

I came to believe that they wanted to create this cast iron all year anytime. If you cut trees as needed it would be green for 6 months and greenwood don't burn. They couldn’t wait for it to cure so making charcoal is how you dry it out and dehydrate it so that it's ready to go.

That was a pretty neat thing to learn just by itself. Without going into a two-page description of how it's done I’ll put a link here to the film I watched.

These are two water driven pistons about 30 feet tall each that pump air into the furnace

There was water coming by from the French Creek and the water wheel would then turn make these giant Bellows breathe in and breathe out and make a constant blast of air onto the furnace. That was cool if you're like me a mechanical junkie refined gearhead.

I was reading about the culture of the Hopewell Furnace at French Creek and what was it like to work here. I was so pleasantly surprised.

After fifty to a hundred years of making very wonderful iron products steel technology kind of ruined them.

The technology they were using here was great for a while but could never become mass-produced. It was a nice product but it was slow and steady, pouring iron into molds.

The world was changing up in Pittsburgh and they started realizing that they could do this on a gigantic scale. Enormous cauldrons would make 10 times the molten metal 3 times faster.

They also started burning coal which that means you didn't have to make charcoal and it was almost endless in supply

The process becomes so refined and then they learned to take it to the next step which was mass-produced steel.

And even as a kid, I seem to remember they call them blast furnaces because before they just heated it and it just poured out by gravity but then they found a way to hello extremely high-pressure air across the molten metal in it removed impurities gave a higher-quality product.

They became good at making things like steel beams, railroad tracks and they were doing this at an amazing speed. This would leave these suddenly quaint old furnaces on a creek paddle wheel kind of thing left behind. It was cool to be standing where it all got started.

CAMPGROUND: FRENCH CREEK STATE PARK

Pennsylvania REGION: Region furnace

843 PARK ROAD

ELVERSON PA 19520