An Industry in Ruins

An Industry in Ruins. Greenwood Furnace State Park. , By the 20th century, iron furnaces like these belonged to the past. The growing cost of transporting raw materials and finished products to and from rural furnaces reduced profits. The forest, the source of wood for charcoal fuel, had been depleted. Iron production, increasingly linked to the demand for steel, shifted to larger, more economical furnaces located in cities., After furnace #2 closed in 1904, workers dismantled abandoned structures, relocated some, and salvaged the wood from others. Vegetation gradually engulfed the two stone stacks that you see today., Not until 1936, when the Civilian Conservation Corps stabilized stack #2 (the ruin on the right), did the most striking reminder of the local iron-making legacy re-emerge. Forty years later, archeologists investigated the ruins of stack#1 (the ruin on the left).,

In the course of a few years the charcoal furnace (Greenwood Furnace) in the township will likely cease operations on account of the scarcity of accessible timber. , Letter published in the Semi Weekly News, Huntingdon, PA, February 13, 1902.

, [Captions:] , Greenwood Furnace in about 1890, twelve years before it ceased operations., In the 1920s, stacks 1 and 2 stood like oversize tombstones, slowly crumbling memorials to the age of rural iron furnaces., The Civilian Conservation Corps stabilized stack #2 in the 1930s, just one of the projects that changed the face of rural America during the Great Depression.