"The Best in America": Juniata Iron and Those Who Made It

In the Cove region there are roadside historical markers with the heading “Juniata Iron.” The few words state that there was a significant iron industry here from the late 1700s into the mid-1800s – but what was the basis of that industry and why does it merit those roadside markers?

Pennsylvania had iron furnaces and forges for nearly a century before the industry established new outposts in central Pennsylvania. The first iron furnace was built in the region in 1785 at Orbisonia. Quickly thereafter more furnaces (which made the cast iron or “pig iron”) and forges (which hammered the furnaces’ product into wrought iron) were constructed that drew on the region’s resources of ore, limestone, and charcoal from the region’s forests.

The entrepreneurs who had the resources to build the furnaces and forges often came from the older iron-making region of southeastern Pennsylvania, and employed masons and other skilled builders who knew how to construct the dams, races, waterwheels, furnace stacks, worker housing and other buildings that made up the extensive iron “plantations” of the time. Remains of such plantations can be seen today at the Greenwood Furnace State Park north of Belleville, PA, and at the Barree forge and furnace site, now within the grounds of the Greene Hills Methodist Camp near Alexandria, Pa.

But who were the several hundred workers who managed and operated each of the iron works in the Juniata Iron region? Some of the workers were undoubtedly locals, some with iron-working knowledge from blacksmithing, or mining knowledge from quarrying. But, as Cove author Judith Redline Coopey has written in her trilogy of books about a fictional Juniata Iron furnace, many iron workers immigrated from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England and Germany. Welshmen were especially valuable, seasoned by experience in a long-established iron industry in Wales, but English, German, and French workers also came to the area with ironworking knowledge.

Recently my wife and I went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, to examine several 1830s account books (shown) of what was first named the Trough Creek Furnace, and later named the Mary Ann Furnace and Forge, in Antis Township, then in Huntingdon County, and now in Blair County. We found that the lists of workers had several last names that were typically Welsh and Scottish, many that were of German origin (including a John Shults, who was identified as a “Dutchman,” probably because he spoke primarily Pennsylvania Dutch), and one intriguing name, Ebenezer Eusicho (and variations of the last name), that is of uncertain origin. Women’s names are not frequent, but references to a few individuals and their positions, including “widow,” do occur. One woman, Rebecca Seipes, indeed, was paid for “resetting an axe.”

Finally, African-Americans (often identified as “Negro”) were significant elements of the iron plantation workforce. When Joseph Walker published in 1966 a thorough study of Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site in Berks County (near Reading, Pa.) he noted that, although the number of African-American workers could not be firmly established, “Negro workers were a part of Hopewell Village during the entire history of the Furnace.” Writings on Juniata furnaces and forges indicate that was also true for them. In the case of the Mary Ann Furnace we found “William Sweat (Negro)” identified as a charcoal maker, or collier, a job that required long hours in smoky, dirty work distant from the plantation. There he oversaw the slow burning that changed carefully cut and stacked wood into charcoal, the fuel for the furnaces and forges. Our research took us only through three years of the 1830s, where Sweat (also recorded as “William Sweet”) appeared regularly in the accounts, and we found one other entry for a worker identified as “Negro.” As Joseph Walker also noted at Hopewell, African-American workers were not consistently identified as such, so further research would likely turn up more of these skilled workers at Mary Ann Furnace.

Juniata Iron was produced by this diversity of workers, each of whom contributed skills and knowledge to making what today’s roadside markers identify as “the best in America” during its heyday.