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Miner from JMMC Co.
stock certificate. |
Bob Hazelton and I (with others) are working on the mining areas of Scotia and Tow Hill, just west(ish) of State College. Both the sites were active in the last decade of the 19th century and shipped thousands of tons of iron ore to the steel mill sin Pittsburgh and Bedford Co. The main interesting thing about them, from my point of view, is that the main industrial plant at both was an ore washer. Typically when you think of iron mining, you assume that wither the raw ore is smelted at or near the mines (typical for early 19thC mining), or was just mined and dumped straight into a rail car or great lakes freighter for shipment to the blast furnaces. But for a great deal of iron ore in the "brown hematite" band of iron on the eastern shoulder of the Appalachians, the ore is embedded in clay and sand to the point that it is worth washing out that material before shipping the relatively high-grade ore to market (even if that market was a furnace 3 miles away).
Scotia was used from at least the 1830s, but its real history begins in the 1880s when Andrew Carnegie purchased the land from Moses Thompson. Carnegie installed a massive ore washer and a rail system to bring the ore to it. The history of Scotia is fairly well known (though I haven't yet found the corporate records), but that of Tow Hill is quite opaque. Tow Hill was started a couple years later, largely by one of Carnegie's men, James Pierpoint [not Pierpont, as he is usually referred to in reports] who 'defected' and brought in a consortium to mine an ore bank a bit further west (but along the same seam). This is where the story gets confusing. The Tow Hill tract, also known as the Juniata mines and the Gatesburg mines is connected into the Juniata Mining Co., which is also/later the Juniata Mining and Manufacturing Co. (though I can't figure out what they manufactured), and has ties to the Study family of Tyrone (E.L. Study and his son Charles A. were both corporate officers, and there is some relation to James A. Study, though he may have only done the Schoenberger mines in Huntingdon Co.). At any rate, the Tow Hill mines are some pretty massive gashes in the sides of Chestnut Ridge and the concern seems to have worked through the 1890s and perhaps into the 1900s. The railway spur to the 'town' was taken out just before WWI.
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| Remains of the WWII-era ore washer. |
Bob has been working on Scotia and the story of its people for some time, and he has been working on finding the foundations of all the old buildings there (the most prominent remains out there are from WWII when the mines were reactivated by the Defense Plant Corporation, but that's the topic of an entirely different entry yet to come), and he and I have gone out to Tow Hill a couple times this fall to map the remains there. The walk out to Tow Hill from the nearest parking spot is a beautiful stroll through the woods. Its not heavily used, but we have passes a few joggers, a couple mountain bikers, a man and his son on the first day of turkey bow season, and one lone walker. The ore pits have filled with water, so now there is a spot that we call 'the beach' where you can sit and watch the lake in great serenity. I'll add more about each mining site, respectively, soon.
