Moonville Tunnel, Vinton County OH

The concept of this blog boils down to one thing—how weird it is to compare what’s here now with what was. If we go back just a few hundred years the chances are pretty good wherever you’re reading this post was just part of the unbroken wilderness. The landmarks around you simply didn't exist—no grocery store, no McDonalds, no “weird 7.5-way intersection.”

As civilization slowly moved across the continent people gravitated either to where it would be easy or profitable to set up shop. Sheltered bays on the coast, along rivers, rich timber, or mineral deposits. As anyone who’s played any Sid Meier game knows, there are only so many “perfect” spots to build a settlement. As a result, it doesn’t take long to start settling on the next-best spots, close to the really good ones. Think about how you may live in an affordable part of town, but work in a nicer area.

After a couple hundred years of this cycle, we have giant metro areas where settlement after settlement piggybacked on an initial “perfect” spot. These suburbs grew out of nothing because once upon a time the initial city had jobs—and we stay because the jobs are still somewhere in this metro area. If not, we’d leave—think about the mass flight from Pittsburgh since the decline of US Steel, or Detroit as the Big Three consolidate. 

This brings us to the Moonville Tunnel in Vinton County, Ohio.

First, the area was all forest. Then the American colonists started pushing West in search of a wilder land with more opportunity. Small homesteads were carved out of the forest, fields were planted, trails and roads grew. This was followed by the mills, the government buildings, the places of commerce needed by any decent sized group of people. But it wasn't the most convenient place to settle—far from rivers, lakes, mountains with minerals. The population stayed small, remote, and underdeveloped compared to cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh.

Then iron ore was discovered in the rocks in the area, and the boom was on. Iron furnaces such as the one at Hope, OH were constructed. Men and material flowed in, creating boom towns all over the region. The area’s remoteness was now offset by the profit that could be made, and for nearly 100 years the development reflected it. Since there was no easy, natural route like a river to get the iron out after smelting (the industries fed by iron weren't located anywhere nearby, remember), railways were financed to bridge the many creek beds and tunnel through the many hills.

Then the iron boom tapered off, eventually into nothingness. The trains hadn't been in the area before the boom—the needs of the population wouldn't cover the expenses of fuel and track maintenance. Once the iron furnaces had all closed and Southeast Ohio returned to pockets of small rural communities many of the railways simply stopped service to this remote area. This is how we end up with places like the Moonville Tunnel, named after a town that no longer exists and built to shelter tracks long ago removed for use elsewhere.

Moonville Tunnel is a perfect spot to practice the surreal act of trying to reconcile how things are now with how they must have been.

Several of these poles were on either side of the tunnel, near the old right-of-way. Considering how good of shape they're in (considering), my hunch is they were from the tail end of the rail line's existence, rather than the original telegraph cables.

Playing with the shutter speed to get the best view--this is a long exposure that gives you a bit of a feel for the over all scale.

Erosion will remove all things, over time--but considering this was put up 112 years ago, I think they did a find job setting the foundation of this wall.

Short exposure reveals just how dark the tunnel gets--I mean, it IS a tunnel. It begs the question--was there any lighting? What kind? It's easy to see how the stories of conductors falling off trains and switchmen getting run over without a sign can be started from the depths of such darkness.

Hope Iron Furnace

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.

Sources for this post:

Division of State Parks, Lake Hope SP

US Forest Service pamphlet on Iron Furnaces in Wayne National Forest

Wikipedia on the Hope Iron Furnace