Posted April 16, 200817 yr Southern Ohio is rich with these furnaces, much like eastern Kentucky and parts of West Virginia. Without these furnaces, much of your larger cities would cease to exist in their total form. It's good to see another one saved from total collapse. Cleanup of old Hamilton Furnace continues By Teresa Moore, Ironton Tribune, April 15, 2008 HAMILTON TOWNSHIP — Unearthing buried treasure. Work continues on a project to clean up the site of the old Hamilton Furnace along the Ohio River in Hamilton Township.
April 20, 200817 yr I used to be really interested in this Hanging Rock Iron stuff, read up on it and even visited that Buckeye Furnance historic site. This charcoal furnace economy was very similar to early German iron making in the Siegerland, with the same problems of getting wood for the charcoal. The industry lasted long enough for the furnaces to appear on early Sanborn maps. The furances around Ironton and up in Wierton show up on the Sanborns. I figure they clearcut the entire region to make charcoal for these furnaces. The industry lasted til the 1960s, with two blast furnaces in Jackson being the last inland (away from the Ohio) ones (they used coke by this time).
August 12, 200915 yr Glory days of furnaces focus of book Lori Shafer made it her goal to create a more current resource for the library on the furnace industry By Benita Heath, The Tribune, July 9, 2009 There was more to being the international center of the pig iron industry than a stack of bricks. That’s what Lori Shafer, a veteran Briggs librarian, learned as she researched her first book, “The Iron Furnaces of Lawrence County Ohio.”
August 29, 200915 yr Never fear! I am here! Here's all that remains of Rockhill Furnace in Pennsylvania. It's located on SR 522 near Orbisonia, the site of East Broad Top Railroad and Rockhill Trolley Museum. It's thought that the site was scavenged for bricks to build the present roundhouse at East Broad Top, as well as other buildings in the area. Jeffrey is right; these small operations cut over all the surrounding forest to make charcoal. The ones with nearby sources of coal were fortunate in that they were able to continue to operate using coke. Most easily-obtained local ore was inferior, though, and the iron was of poor quality and usually went into locally forged hand tools and other simple items. Output quantities were low, and the businesses were seldom very profitable. By late in the nineteenth century they became overshadowed by big producers that sprang up nearer to sources of good ore and coking coal. The introduction of Bessemer Converters and open-hearth furnaces facilitated the production of very large quantities of high-quality steel with a smaller amount of relatively unskilled labor, and brought an end to most of the small charcoal-and-bog-iron producers by early in the 20th century. And on the topic of the dying craft of journalism ... Cleanup of old Hamilton Furnace continues By Teresa Moore, Ironton Tribune, April 15, 2008 HAMILTON TOWNSHIP — Unearthing buried treasure. Work continues on a project to clean up the site of the old Hamilton Furnace along the Ohio River in Hamilton Township. [ ... ] Covered in vines and blocked by trees, passersby on the river and on U.S. 52 couldn’t see it ... [ ... ] Passersby on the river and on U.S. 52 were covered in vines and blocked by trees? :? If they had moved faster, they might not have become overgrown. :|
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