Click on that one link I provided Lloyd, and you will see it was all around you. I've seen a million of those reddish rocks and didn't know our ancestors figured out how to melt them down to make iron. That was why they built those furnaces where they did. They had to be close to the raw materials. There are several types of iron ore of varying quality and percentage of iron content. They also needed some limestone, and of course wood for charcoal... lots of wood. Some later furnaces used coal, and we had lots of that too. My buddy and I used to dig buckets of coal to take to camp to feed the potbelly stove. I've learned that old surface seam was once used to feed one of these furnaces.
None of that stuff was easy to transport any distance back then, when the few roads were little more than dirt trails. It helped if they could put a furnace near a stream large enough to float a boat, to transport the iron to the Allegheny or other rivers to get it to market. Andrew McCaslin, the guy who built Rockland furnace, and his wife were drowned in the river when their little barge capsized in rapids a couple miles downstream as they were transporting pig iron to Pittsburgh.
I laughed when you said it is still the middle of nowhere. I remember the first time I took my Brother-in-law from California to the hunting camp near Tionesta. He was amazed at the amount of wilderness and wooded lands. He had always been under the impression that Pa. is nothing but urban sprawl and cities. Nothing could be further from the truth.
