About this Story
This newspaper reporter was curious about all the talk of the Iron Furnaces in the Hanging Rock Ohio Iron Regions, so he took a trip to visit them in person. He documented his first-hand experiences during his trip and published them in the Ironton Register, Ironton, Ohio, newspaper on 21 April 1887.
The newspaper was very dark and hard to read. You will notice spaces in the words that could not be made out. If anyone has a better copy and would be willing to share, please let us a comment below.
A Reporter Visits Lawrence County, Ohio Iron Furnaces.
PEN PICTURES AND GENERAL NOTES.
About a Well-Known Furnace Property.
Ironton Register, Thursday, April 21, 1887.
The glory of “Little Etna” as a furnace has departed.
Her machinery and buildings have all been removed, and only the stack and abutting _________, which stand amid drifts of ore-dust and cinder deposit, ___, left to mark the site of an ancient and profitable concern. They will blacken with age, and in their widening crevices, tufts of grass and moss may find lodgement ere they feel again the heat of furnace fires. But the business of the furnace grounds is still kept up. Two hundred fifty men are employed there among the hills getting out ore and lime for Alice furnace, so the office and stove, the main center of these operations, are not forsaken but very active.
One is reminded, as he approaches the company’s office from the railroad, of the woodcut pictures of a village street found in old-time storybooks. The office is a very old brick structure with small windows and a steep roof, whose ____ slopes quite overbalance the height of the sidewalks. Its big gable ends _____ prominently in the picture.
Just beyond the office, the higher walls of the storehouse appear, and beyond these again, the Manager’s residence, almost hidden from view. This row of buildings occupies a slight eminence in the narrow valley over which the road runs from our point of observation, descending again on the other side as it passes the dismantled furnace nearby.
A well-trodden path leads up to the corner of the office, where begins a stone pavement rudely constructed of angular and uneven blocks of flagging long ago. It has worn smooth under the pressure of many feet. In the forks of a grand old tree near the corner, there is a bell whose notes proclaim at intervals the working hours of the day.
When the reporter made these observations, the weather was most propitious. The earth was clean from the washings of a recent rain. The sun shone brightly through cloudless skies, and a delightful breeze made manifest its bracing influence. Under these lovely conditions he took a seat beside the Etna manager, George Cox, and accompanied him on his daily ride over to Vesuvius furnace.
The Etna Iron Works Co. owns 16,000 acres of land around Etna and Vesuvius furnaces, and a short time ago, an expert geologist was sent out to determine how much of the tract was ore land. He made an estimate showing there were six or seven thousand acres.
The ore will average at least 12 inches thick, and at that thickness, a square yard produces a ton. The Etna company mines about 30,000 tons a year. Following the calculation based on these estimates, they only use a little more than 5 acres per annum and have enough ore to last, at the present rate of consumption, over a thousand years.
Vesuvius is a gem of a furnace. She is substantially but economically equipped, and apparently, the general arrangement of the plant is very excellent. The furnace has an elevator similar to those in use at coke furnaces to raise the ore from one floor and the fuel from another.
The ore is burned in two ovens in quantities sufficient for immediate use. The boilers are on top of the stack where they can be ____ by the heat of the furnace. The _________ is an old timer–a horizontal affair, which with a steam cylinder, two blowing cylinders, and three pitmans, covers most of the floor of the engine room, but it does splendid work. Vesuvius makes about 10 tons of cold blast iron daily on all gray ore, but on a test run on half red ore a few days since, the output reached 12 tons per day.
What a commodious yard Vesuvius has, and what a fine location for a furnace! She stands in the middle of a gentle slope that rises gradually from the bed of Storms Creek to the base of a high rocky cliff several hundred yards away. The cliff is abrupt and imposing and overshadows what is seemingly a great pile of charcoal, though it is only enough to run the furnace for three or four weeks when the furnace will stop for a few weeks, and the next year’s stock will begin to come in to fill up again the spacious yard beneath the cliff.
The rocks that hover over the charcoal are not the only rocks around Vesuvius. The surrounding hills are fringed by them and viewed by the shade of the office entrance that morning, by the light of the bright sun, the lofty hill-tops showing one above the other at several points, the wooded and rocky slopes and the well-watered valley was a picture of nature of no ordinary beauty.
At various places on the Etna lands, railroad stakes are encountered. They mark the lines surveyed by the Dayton & Ironton people in quest of a suitable route from Texas Hollow to Ironton, and several routes have been surveyed.
Over on Cannon’s Creek, at almost the opposite corner from Vesuvius of the Etna domain, they have the largest ore kiln burning that they ever set up. It contains 8,000 tons of ore, which will be shipped to Alice.
The Post Office at Pedro consists of a two-by-two-foot section of pigeon holes to which only the postmaster has access, and a mail sack hung up in the corner. The cabinet of pigeon holes reminds us of a similar contraption in the lumber room of the REGISTER office, which tradition says once accommodated the greater part of the Post Office business in Ironton. Samuel McGugin is the postmaster at Pedro. He is also a store-keeper, and, assisted by his brother Rob, handles a tremendous trade at certain periods of the month.
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