"Juniata Iron." The phrase conjures images of flat-topped stone pyramids and 'ancient' stone ruins dotting the rural landscape of 21st-Century Central Pennsylvania, the remnants of a long-gone era. During the late-Eighteenth and early-Nineteenth centuries the Juniata region (encompassing the counties of Bedford, Blair, Huntingdon, and Mifflin) was an important part of Pennsylvania's iron industry, especially the foundries and rolling mills of Pittsburgh. By the mid-19 Century, the water-powered charcoal iron furnaces and forges of the Juniata region produced 40% of the pig and wrought iron consumed by the foundries and rolling mills of Pittsburgh (Kenneth Warren, The American Steel Industry, 1850-1970: A Geographical Interpretation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 29-31).
During the 1870s coke began to replace charcoal as the principal fuel for producing pig and wrought iron. Coke, which is a contraction of "coal cake," is a nearly pure-carbon fuel made by heating bituminous coal in an oxygen-poor environment. Its stronger load-bearing capacity enabled the construction of blast furnaces much larger than traditional charcoal blast furnaces. Furthermore, it could be made year-round and transported in bulk over large distances. All of these advantages over charcoal led to the rapid expansion of iron and steel making in Pittsburgh and other industrial cities in western Pennsylvania.
Go "An 1870's Iron Making Primer" for a short history and primer on late-19th Century blast furnace operations.
The discovery that bituminous coal from the isolated Broad Top coalfield in northern Bedford and southern Huntingdon counties gave rise to an iron-making district based on coke and still-plentiful iron ore in the Juniata region. Between 1868 and1884 four companies built coke-fired blast furnaces on the fringes of the Broad Top coalfield. The Rockhill Iron & Coal Company was one of them, going into blast at Rockhill in 1876. The others, located on the Raystown Branch Juniata River in Bedford County, were as follows:
Kemble Coal & Iron Co., Riddlesburg, 1868
R. H. Powell Co., Saxton, 1882
Everett Iron Co., Everett, 1884
The Rockhill Iron & Coal Company (RI&C) grew out of the old charcoal iron industry near the Borough of Orbisonia and a new firm that hoped to develop its coal property in the Broad Top coalfield. Iron ore deposits under Blacklog Mountain, which extends from the Juniata River opposite Mifflintown southwest to Blacklog Creek near Orbisonia supported three sporadically operated charcoal iron furnaces near the latter place between 1785 and the 1840s. The most consistent of them was Rockhill Furnace, which went back into blast briefly during the Civil War. In 1867 Percival P. Dewees, a Philadelphia-based capitalist, bought and reconditioned the works. But for some reason (probably depletion of the old mines in the immediate vicinity) his enterprise suffered from lack of ore. Dewees discovered new ore deposits north of Three Springs, about six miles west of Orbisonia, but the difficult wagon-haul over unimproved roads was a costly problem. Meanwhile a group of Dewees' fellow Philadelphians had gotten control of thousands of acres on the east side of the Broad Top coalfield, but they had yet to develop it. Realizing the potential for a successful modern blast furnace based on coking coal from the East Broad Top coalfield and Dewees' new sources of iron ore, the two groups joined forces to form the RI&C.
The RI&C partners revived an old railroad charter for the East Broad Top Railroad, which they built to connect their coal mines at Robertsdale to a new blast furnace complex across Blacklog Creek from the old charcoal furnace. The railroad would also ship their pig iron and excess coal to distant markets via a connection with the Pennsylvania Railroad at Mt. Union.
See "The Rockhill Furnace" for a detailed essay on the RI&C's blast furnace complex.
Between 1876 and 1893 RI&C was a completely self-sufficient merchant pig iron company, making pig iron for sale on the open market. The company built a 3-ft. gauge tram line from a junction with the EBT yard near the Rockhill station (renamed Orbisonia station in 1903) extending into Blacklog Narrows to serve the blast furnace, iron mines and limestone quarry. In the mid-1880s the Shade Gap RR, chartered by several of the EBT's directors, built a narrow gauge line from the end of the RI&C tram at Blacklog station to Shade Gap. Between 1885 and 1890 the iron and coal company leased five iron mines in Shade Valley. The SGRR built the Shade Valley Branch north from Shade Gap station as far as the RI&C mine at Nancy, while the RI&C added an extension of its own from there to Richvale. Members of RI&C also built the Booher Branch Railway to tap an ore deposit southwest of Rockhill. The EBT operated all of these lines under lease agreements. The map below shows the RI&C's tracks in red.
RI&C built three company towns to house its workers.
Rockhill, which the company originally called "Cromwell," housed the managers and workers of the iron and coke complex as well as employees of the EBT. This site became the operating hub of the EBT. The new company town, which was situated on the opposite side of the EBT's Rockhill yard from the blast furnace and coke ovens, usurped the name of the "old" Rockhill Village that had grown up around the charcoal iron furnaces in Blacklog Narrows. In 1900 the census differentiated between the "old" and "new" Rockhills. But by 1910 "new" Rockhill was a newly chartered borough in its own right, and "old" Rockhill had essentially disappeared -- its remnants reduced to being the outskirts of Orbisonia.
RI&C built two coal-mining towns, Robertsdale (1873) and Woodvale (1891) at the south end of the EBT. These two company towns are dealt with in two illustrated essays:
"Robertsdale Illustrated", and
"Woodvale Illustrated"
RI&C ran its blast furnace continuously and successfully until the Panic of 1893 led to a depression in the iron and steel market. Contemporary newspaper accounts suggest that the company intended to keep the furnace going with reduced wages. But a strike by native-born workers and violence directed by the strikers against Rockhill's small community of Eastern European immigrants, who wanted to continue to work, decided the issue. The Rockhill Furnace sat idle until 1902.
In 1902 a group of RI&C directors formed the Rockhill Furnace Company to lease and operate the Rockhill furnace. But a lot had changed in the nine years the plant lay idle. First, the plant was obsolete even by the standards of its counterparts in Bedford County. Moreover, the Shade Valley ore leases had expired and at the land owners were not disposed to agree to favorable terms for new leases. RFC was forced to turn to outside sources for its iron ore, which increased the base cost of -- and transportation cost of -- the essential raw material. Despite these problems, however, the company kept the furnace in blast at a higher rate of output than during the 1880s.
Another depression following the Panic of 1907 idled the Rockhill furnace again, and it never went back into blast. Popular legend has it that the Rockhill furnace died because it couldn't compete with the large integrated iron and steel firms that emerged in the early 20th Century. But like all of the legends surrounding RI&C and the EBT, this one does not stand up under scrutiny.
All three of the Rockhill furnace's counterparts on the Raystown Branch survived under small, independent merchant pig iron firms into the early 1920s; the Riddlesburg furnace lasted until 1936! In fact, none of the Raystown Branch blast furnaces were idle for more than two years following 1893. Had RI&C wanted -- or been able -- to compete with its neighbors between 1895 and 1902 it could have put its furances back in blast. But it did not do so, nor did RI&C chose to re-enter the pig iron market after the brief depression following the Panic of 1907. While the coal & iron companies along the Raystown Branch modernized their blast furnace plants prior to World War I, RI&C modernized its facilities for the production of coal. The fact that prosperity came to firms on both sides of the Broad Top coalfield suggests that that decision by the directors of the Rockhill Iron & Coal Company to abandon pig iron production was made, not forced.
Sources:
Contemporay Newspapers of Huntingdon County, PA, especially the Huntingdon Globe and the Huntingdon Journal. Microfilm collecion of Beeghly Library, Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA.Directories of the American Iron and Steel Association. Reference Collection, Science and Technology Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
Annual Reports of the East Broad Top Railroad to the State Auditor General. Records of the Bureau of Statistics in Records of the Department of Internal Affairs, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA.
Lee Rainey and Frank Kyper, East Broad Top (Golden West Books, 1982).
Lee Rainey, "The EBT in the Iron Age, Pt. 1 - 4" in Model Railroad Craftsman, March - June 1990.
Jon D. Baughman, Men of Iron: A History of the Iron Industry of South-Central Pennsylvania, 1785 - 1950 (Broad Top Bulletin, 1998).