Event Date:  August 31, 2008

MOUNTAINS, METAL, AND MEN

Peace Church will present a slide presentation on the story of Pine Grove Furnace at 3 p.m. on Sunday, August 31, 2008. Admission is free. No reservations are necessary. Handicapped access is available behind the resource center. Seating is limited to approximately 225 people. Parking is available in the office lot directly across St. John’s Church Road. For more information call 422-5486.
Bill Engle will give the presentation on Iron Furnaces of Southcentral Pennsylvania entitled "Men, Mountains and Metal". Bill is a graduate of Shippensburg University and Temple University with 38 years of teaching history in the public school of Pennsylvania. The talk is also a visual tribute to the Pennsylvania Iron Masters and workers who built and kept in blast the old stone iron furnaces scattered across the southern region of the state. Highlighted will be the furnaces of Pine Grove Furnace in Cumberland County, Cornwall in Lancaster County, and Hopewell in Berks County.

Southern Pennsylvania was rich in resources vital to the production of iron; limestone, hardwood forests, and iron ore. Mid-Eighteenth Century European settlers brought with them the 4,000 year old knowledge of how to wrestle iron from nature's resources. This skill would be applied in the forests of the state for over 150 years.

The iron cauldrons would supply the everyday necessary objects for the farmers, townspeople, and developing industries of the young state. Tools, cooking utensils, cast iron plate stoves, nails, horseshoes, rails, were produced in great abundance by the dozens of furnace plantations scattered along the iron bearing southern ridges of the Keystone State.

The larger furnaces such as Pine Grove Furnace, Cornwall, and Hopewell supplied cannons, shot and shell to George Washington's army in the American Revolution and the Union army during the American Civil War.

Eventually the production of the antiquated iron furnace was surpassed by the far more efficient, better quality and high production technologies of the urban iron and steel plants. An era had passed. The outmoded stone furnaces gradually halted production from east to west in southern areas of the state. Pine Grove Furnace began production of the vital metal in 1763 and went out of blast for the last time in 1895.