An 1825 snapshot of Bellefonte iron

An interesting little exchange regarding early Bellefonte iron production:

William Thomas, the co-owner of the Bellefonte forge sent a letter to Thomas Copeland in Pittsburgh on supplying iron:

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Bellefonte Forge 28 Jan 1825

Dear [Mr Copeland],

  In answer to your enquiry respecting Iron in your late visit to this place we make the following statement—

  Blooms from three to three and a half inches diameter (eight square or the corners hammered) perfectly welded & slag ends cut off, we will deliver at this place at one hundred & twenty dollars pr ton or one hundred & fifty dollars in Pittsb'g.  If taken as they come from the refining process, that is to say without the second heating & welding or cutting off of fag ends, one hundred dollars at this place or one hundred & thirty dollars pr ton in Pittsburgh.

  Gun scalps[1] drawn in the usual manner we will deliver here at one hundred & thirty dollars, or one hundred & sixty dollars pr ton in Pittsb'g.  The roled [sic] gun iron of this form [drawing of a sort of smiley-shaped cross section] is yet a new business to us. I could not fix a permanent price, but are now of opinion we can furnish it at one hundred & twenty dollars pr ton at this place.  The price of carriage from this place to Harpers Ferry, we cannot now ascertain, but five dolls [unclear] the usual price from the Huntington County works will deliver it from this place.
  When a certain portion of iron should be ready for delivery, it must be inspected at this place—particularly the Blooms, as they would be of little value to us if condemned at any other place. The payment would of course be on the delivery of the artcle.

  The quality of our iron, we presume is known to you & its uniformity we will guarantee, as we manufacture all the pig mettle [sic] we use at our Forge & our ore is all of one quality & we have no hesitation in saying, that [it] is of the first quality for Bar iron.

Respectfully yours,

for Valetine & Thomas

Wm A. Thomas

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  On April 16, John Risar[?], the assistant armorer at Harper's Ferry wrote to the Chief of Ordnance at the War Department, saying, "I do here by certify that the Iron latetely brought to this place by Mr. Copeland has been tried in different ways and found to be of an excelllent quality [and] that the barrel which Mr. Copeland carries with him has been made in haste and was not intended to be finished, but which was ery eaily orked by being bored and turned."  It seems, then, that Copeland got the iron from Valentine and Thomas to used for a gun barrel that he was then having tested at harpers Ferry.  The question remains whether this was small or large ordnance. All cannon at this time were cast iron or brass, so the guttered scalps suggest this was a wrought smaller gun, though scalps were typically used for larger pieces and Harpers Ferry only made firearms, not cannon.

  We know that Copeland was an important steam engine maker and all around mechanic in Pittsburgh who improved upon Bolton & Watt's steam engine design and that by 1815 there were three foundries in Pittsburgh capable of casting cannon (one of which also had a large boring engine for those cannon)[2], but the connection between Copeland and the foundries is unclear.  He had come up through the foundry and rolling mill trade, and in 1824, Col. George Bomford of the Ordnance Department had sent him to Harpers Ferry to solve a production problem.  Fundamentally, he decided, it was due to bad Juniata iron being used there and Copeland recommended dropping their usual supplier in Huntington, PA, and getting their bar iron from Valentine & Thomas and also from Gloniger & Anschutz in Tyrone.[3]

  Clearly the Bellefonte iron passed the test with flying colors.

These letters are found at the National Archives, Records of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, War Dept., Letters Rec'd, 1825-26 [RG 156/21/29/fol. 'T-Jan-Feb 1825 Ord.'].

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• [1] a gun scalp was a trough-shaped hammered or rolled bar of iron.  It is interesting that Valentine and Thomas were on the cutting edge of manufacturing this commodity; see Paul J. Uselding, "Henry Burden and the Question of Anglo-American Technological Transfer in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Economic History 30.2 (1970): 312-337.  The term seemed to survive in the more remote iron regions as late as 1894; see, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 29.21 (1894): 257.
• [2] Niles Weekly Register, 29 April 1815, p.141 and James Riddle, The Pittsburgh Directory for 1815, pp. 20 and 138.
• [3] Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: the Challenge of Change (MIT pRess, 1976) pp. 165-167ff.

The panel draft

And ultimately, here is a near-final draft of what the designer developed.  Quite a beautiful layout and text flow, but you can get the idea of how little text there is and how much detail of my already stripped-down narrative had to go.  It's been eye-opening for me, to say the least, to learn about how public signs are developed.  Part of me completely understand, but part of me is saddened that so much deep history is never conveyed when you actually visit a site.  Please don't take any of this as a complaint.  I've just had my eyes opened as to the process.

Click the image for a full-screen (readable) version

The submitted text and pictures (long post)

So here is what I submitted to Clearwater.  Note that the directions from the sign are unclear, as I did not know where the sign was to be situated.  For what this became on the panel, see the next post....

Harmony Forge and Milesburg Ironworks

Milesburg Ironworks, probably 1870s

The Milesburg iron furnace stood on this spot for over two hundred years.  The falling waters of Spring Creek here in Muncy Gap powered a sizeable iron manufacturing complex.  Begun in the last years of the eighteenth century, an iron furnace stood where the circular iron feature sits in the lawn [insert direction from sign here].  A dam across the rapids, originally of timber and later of concrete, formed a large pond to the south that drove waterwheels and turbines to blow air into the blast furnace and then to power mechanical forge hammers and rolling machinery.

The furnace originally processed iron ore from local ore banks and then from the Scotia area.  In 1830, Gen. James Irvin expanded the furnace to include a forge mill and later a rolling mill.  In 1864 the complex was purchased by Dr. J.M. McCoy and James H. Linn and by the end of the nineteenth century, this forge included a 6-hammer bloomery that produced 2,500 tons of charcoal blooms annually.  The furnace also cast specialty castings, such as the window lintels in the small square brick office building that still stands on the private property to the north.

Postcard of the McCoy and Linn
 Ironworks before 1922

By the turn of the century McCoy & Linn had three puddling furnaces and two heating furnaces in the forge mill, and three rolling trains that turned out all sizes of soft iron bar and wire rods (2,250 and 1,350 tons annually, respectively).  McCoy & Linn also built a wire works and a chain factory half a mile upstream from this complex.

Between the World Wars, the ironworks declined and by the Great Depression it was largely out of business, though a new expanded rolling mill had been built across the river in the 1910s when the concrete dam was installed.  By 1931 McCoy had then dismantled the furnace and forge mill buildings on this side of the river and in 1926 built a private hydroelectric generating building on the east end of the dam, which provided electrical power until the 1980s.

Milesburg Ironworks, c.1930

Development of the Milesburg Iron Works and Canal
(left: late 19th century; right: early 20th century)

Map of the Bald Eagle and Spring
Creek Navigation Co. canal, 1834

Bald Eagle and Spring Creek Canal

Bellefonte has been the county seat of Centre Co. since 1800 because of the idea that a canal could be built to the Susquehanna, though it took nearly a half-century to realize that idea.  By the 1830s, with the success of the Erie Canal (opened 1825) connecting Albany to Buffalo as well as the planned successes of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (opened 1831), canal fever gripped the nation.  The west branch of the Susquehanna Canal had made the river reliably navigable to Lock Haven and in 1834 Bellefonte—already an important iron-producing city as well as the natural outlet for agricultural produce from the Nittany and Penns valleys—wanted to connect into that transportation network. 

A joint stock company, backed by State guarantees of interest but subscribed to by the local ironmasters, was formed to build the Bald Eagle and Spring Creek Navigation Company canal from Bellefonte to Lock Haven.  Designed to have the same size locks as the Pennsylvania State Canal system (begun 1824), by 1840 it was completed from Lock Haven to Milesburg and then on to Bellefonte by 1848.  The canal operated successfully for 17 years, bringing in at least $4000 annually to the company as well as great prosperity to Bellefonte.  It was, however, largely put out of commission to barge traffic by a spring freshet in 1865.  Although repairs were contemplated, by this time the railroad made them unviable and the canal declined into a series of disconnected watercourses.  They remained mostly watered and some of the locks held water until their wooden gates rotted away in the twentieth century.

Canal lock similar to that on the BESCN
C&O canal (Lock 34) near Sharpsburg, MD
[HABS, MD,22-HARF.V,8-1]

You are standing just west of the upper basin of lock no. 4 and the remains of the lock are about 80yds. to the north.  The iron bridge to Harmony Mansion sits over the former upper lock gates, and one side of the stonework is still in reasonable repair.  Lock no. 5, another 300yds. downstream is in slightly better condition.  This parking area now stands in the basement of the forge mill by the stone and concrete wall that separated it from the canal, which has now been filled with about 5ft. of sediment from behind the dam.  If you walk into the canal through the gap in the wall, to your left you will see the remains of the stone foundations of the charging bridge to the furnace, seen in the photo [insert direction to photo 1].

From draft to panel

So I have been helping Clearwater Conservancy in designing a sign for the old McCoy Dam site between Bellefonte and Milesburg.  It's been an education, to be sure.  When they said we'd like 300 words and a couple pictures, I said sure before really thinking how few 300 words is (up to 'is', I've already typed 50 and said nothing!).  So then I set to work, and found that trying to do justice to both the Milesburg Ironworks and the Bald Eagle & Spring Creek Navigation canal in only 300 was nigh impossible (well, I could not do it).  So I wrote about 300 on each, chose some pictures (3 for each, as it turns out), and sent it in.

The panel designer did an amazing job compressing, but inevitably had to loose a great deal of information.  I don't envy their work, though I am amazed at what they had done.  So in the next two posts, you will see the original draft and info I sent in, and then the final (or near final) product.  The sign is to be installed before the snow falls, so go have a look a the site later this fall.  It's on the west side of the rte 144 half way between Bellefonte and Milesburg.  Apparently a good fishing spot now, and you can still see the old rolling mill foundation across the river.

Or, if you want to see what was there before the dam came out, have a look here.