Thanks for the wishes for a good flintlock deer hunt. I'm afraid my freezer won't have venison until next year, but it was great to be out there, and I saw things that made it seem like a very successful hunt. On Friday, I decided to go to the area around Freedom Falls and the Rockland Furnace which was built in 1832. I found it pretty easily, and the area was open to hunting. I took a number of photos with my phone, and will post some as soon as I dump them into the computer. The scenery was gorgeous.
Unlike the Webster Furnace I posted a pic of, The Rockland Furnace is more intact, and someone has taken the time to clear away brush and to cut down a number of small trees growing out of it. This is wonderful, because those roots would eventually push the cut stones apart and topple the furnace. The Mill Race and Wheel Pit are largely intact, and you could see into the bosh and up the flue. I still can't imagine how they managed to build and operate these things. While not nearly as large as the Pyramids of Egypt or other ancient ruins, a number of the cut stones are large enough to break the leaf springs and blow the tires of my pickup truck. And all they had was wooden wagons and stone boats pulled by draft horses.
Like Lloyd says, learning more about these furnaces answers a lot of questions, but it makes me think of many more. How did they move these stones? How did they cut them without steel chisels or carbide or diamond saws? There is no shortage of rocks in the Rockland area, with many glacial boulders bigger than a large house. When they transported the pig iron down the Allegheny River to sell it in Pittsburgh, how did they get back home, going upstream against the current? They sure didn't fire up the Evinrude because gasoline engines hadn't been invented yet.
Another great website I found is this one... and it also has info on early lead shot towers if you navigate from their home page:
https://www.oldindustry.org/iron.html
