Centre County Government

2. Charcoal Iron Heritage

Centre County's first industry was a "plantation" of a different kind-an iron plantation. In 1792, 8 years before the county came into being, Samuel Miles and John Patton put in operation the first charcoal iron furnace west of the Susquehanna and north of the Juniata on 8,000 acres of wooded tableland in Nittany Valley. The "Juniata Iron" industry, that by 1810 was producing half the pig iron in the United States, began on Spring Creek.

Even in 1900, the remains of Centre Furnace retained the look of an iron plantation. Stack is at right. CCHS Collections.

This is the same Samuel Miles who was opening Brush Valley. Philadelphia merchant and mayor of the city in 1791, Miles had a gift for getting the best land surveyed for him—limestone farmland in Brush Valley and Gatesburg iron ore around Centre Furnace, where State College now lies. Col. Patton entered the Nittany Valley wilderness in 1789 with a band of dislocated iron workers and in three years had a furnace ready to go. By 1794 an English traveler who spent a night with the Pattons found much to admire:

Col. Patton he's the proprietor of a fine tract of land in the neighborhood of the furnace and a sawmill which are worked by the waters of Spring Creek, a branch of Bald Eagle Creek. The spring which forms Spring Creek is but about 300 or 400 yards above the sawmill and there is water enough to work several other mills or forges to advantage. The Col.'s ore is of such a quality that two tons of Iron ore will make one ton of iron pigs.

That three-mill spring is now "captured" and supplies Penn State.

The furnace "quickly attracted many other iron entrepreneurs to the Spring Creek region." Philip Benner led his own group of workers to the wilderness and opened a forge in 1793, adding iron furnaces later. John Dunlop, Daniel Turner, and Miles' sons Joseph and John built forges in and near Bellefonte in 1795. The Valentine brothers, Roland Curtin, Joseph Green, Isaac McKinney, Peter Karthaus, John Lyon, Joseph Harris, and Robert T. Stewart, among others, followed suit and made fortunes. By 1826, nine furnaces, six forges and two rolling mills in the county were turning out over 10,000 tons of pig iron and 3,100 tons of bar iron annually. Between 1800 and 1850, according to a source found by Philip Klein, Centre County, with Huntingdon and Blair counties, produced as much iron as France, one-half as much as England, during the same period.

The iron plantations strove to be as self-sufficient as possible. A large Company farm and surrounding tenant farms supplied meat and most vegetables for the whole community of workers. Each furnace owned vast tracts of oak forest where charcoal was made by "colliers." It took around 8,000 cords of hardwood annually—cut, stacked, cooked to charcoal, and hauled-to fuel a furnace. The "ridges" north of Bald Eagle Valley were entirely cut over for charcoal, leaving dense stands of new growth woods like those in another iron furnace region, the "Wilderness" area of Virginia where so many Civil War battles were fought. Ore banks where the iron was mined left few permanent scars; the richest ore was close to the surface and first to be mined. Many blacks were employed at the furnaces, just as in the South, except that here they were free or indentured. In 1840 over 11% of Bellefonte's population was black.

Those little stacks we see coming into State College or at Curtin Furnace afforded living wages for hard work to 100-200 workers each and made their owners powerfully rich.