So these days if you're hiking in Southern Ohio long enough, the odds are pretty good you'll stumble along something like this:
It's a reminder that once, about 150 years back for anyone keeping score, the Hanging Rock region of Ohio (a 100 by 28 mile iron-rich area that ran from Kentucky to West Virginia, cutting through Southeast Ohio) provided the majority of high quality pig iron for the United States and beyond.
Fires were built in the base of the furnace with charcoal made from the surrounding forest. Air was forced into the furnace (giving "blast furnaces" their name--blasts of air superheated the charcoal) and melted down the iron ore with limestone. Impurities would float to the top of the molten iron mixture, and could then be removed. This is what we call "slag," and at some furnace sites you can still find it in the ground.
For those of you who have traveled in Southern Ohio and seen how it's all blanketed with trees, think about that. 46 furnaces running full tilt, constantly cutting down trees to use as charcoal. This went on for nearly 100 years, and since the last furnaces stopped operating in the 1910's the forests have come back--that tells you something about how things have gone for the region since the iron boom ended.
Part of why the Hope furnace was built here is the hill it's nestled against--because of the height of the furnace (see photo below) it was easy to build a bridge from the hill to dump the iron and limestone into the top. The stone in the hill also makes me wonder (I couldn't find any evidence of this) if the site wasn't chose because of easy access to building materials.
The Sandy Run river also flows near the site of the furnace, which in the 1850's would have been a key source of transport and power. What strikes me is even after accounting for preservation efforts, this structure is still intact after being left more or less alone for 140 years. The rest of the structures are long gone, and even the adjacent sandstone structure is run down. But it's still not hard to tell what this furnace was used for (at least in a broad sense).
At this time (March 2014) I haven't been able to find definitive explanation for the structure on the right. But, my best guess is a small, less intense furnace for creating charcoal to use in the main iron furnace. I'm going to keep digging into this, because I'm pretty surprised there's no clear answer. It's another big stone structure sitting next to the one the signs and literature speak to, but you're going to ignore it? Very curious.
Try as I did, I couldn't get a really good shot into the furnace. It's not much to look at--years of leaves, fallen stone, wooden reinforcing. Not much that one of the furnace workers would recognize, I'm assuming...tho that might be more because there's no deadly fire inside.
Above the furnace the woods are littered with cut stones, like the one above. At first glance, it's easy to assume it's a cannibalized piece of the furnace...but this looks like a base stone, and getting it 20 feet up a steep hill just to abandon it seems unlikely. It could be a stone from some other long-removed structure--the village of Hope did essentially vanish once the iron furnace ceased production, and the structures that could be salvaged were.
To me it highlights the challenge of archaeology in general. There are a LOT of clues, and clues from multiple eras all exist together. Being able to properly sort them out, and draw the correct conclusion (as opposed to one that supports a pet theory) is the tricky part, and that takes a lot of time and energy.
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