These trail names attest to the many communities that formed to support the raw resources needed by the furnace and the required labor to run multiple operations manned by both adults and children. I couldn't help but think of the children who worked here and what a different life they led compared to the family with children hiking ahead of me. At the intersection of Dogtown road and Brush Ridge Road the family turned right towards the furnace ruins - still a mile off - while I turned left to walk the ridge road several miles further to the ore banks.
The communities in and around the Greenwood Furnace continued to gather at the park long after the furnace closed in the early 1900s and many were glad of the preservation efforts by DCNR state parks and the National Historic Site program under the National Park Service. A nearby community church is still in use and ancestors are buried in the cemetery kept up by volunteers along the road into the campground. It seems all the ground within park boundaries has been worked, managed, cultivated, mined, or utilized by the Greenwood Furnace complex and its supporting communities. Now, like most of PA's 18th century industrial landscapes that helped build our nation, it has converted to forest and wildlands.
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| Shale fields at the trail intersection with Dogtown Road and Brush Ridge Road Trails. |
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| Brush Ridge Road Trail |
The rain tipped down for brief periods but between showers the sun tried to break through the mottled cloud deck. I pulled my pack cover over my pack but I didn't wear a rain jacket. It was just too hot and muggy for that. I was drenched head to toe and so was Amos. Oh well. Summer in PA. The road passed several mysterious pits and trenches that, for the hiker who concentrates only on the trail in front of them would have been easy to miss. I explored several of these pits and found wagon paths that seemed to connect all of them back to the ridge road. In all the greenery and lush forest, it was hard to imagine the mountain cleared of trees, raw and cut open on a hot, exposed slope in summer.
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| Bank quarry |
Despite some sections of Brush Ridge Road Trail being overgrown, the path was very beautiful with a ravine falling off to one side and the steep ore-rich slope spreading down on the other side. The road stayed true to the ridge and made a beeline along small outcrops of shale and sandstone, plenty wide for two wagons to pass each other coming and going. Every now and then the forest opened into glades of grass and meadow flowers before plunging into back pockets of young, stunted forest so thick and dark that I hurried through not being able to see more than a few feet into the gloom on either side of the trail.
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| Ebony Spleenwort |
I had just been reading in camp the book Windswept (2021) by Annabel Abbs. In it she explains that xlophobia is the fear of the forest, especially the dark and foreboding woods, a throwback, she supposes, to a time living on open savanna or along wide steppes where forests were distant and out-of bounds. These places contained predators hiding in wait for hapless human wanderers. Folktales and stories persist even today of the dark spooky woods where only bad things can come from entering them. Wolves. Great bears. Giant toothy wild cats. Wild boars. And demons. I found my heart racing a little as I urged Amos on ahead to get to the next clearing!
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| Summit view from the Brush Ridge Road Trail - lifting clouds but still very dark |
The clearings contained banks of ruby red wineberries, raspberries, deep blue-black raspberries, and carpets of blueberries. We both enjoyed handfuls of sweet/tart rain-soaked juiciness as we sauntered slowly through the wet meadows, every now and then getting a peek at the mountain across the valley, its ridge crest emerging slowly from dreary scudding clouds. At that moment I thought "oh, yeah - bears" just when Amos perked up and began to do his circle dance sniffing the air with his coonhound nose to pinpoint the source of a scent. Even I could smell the scent of a bear recently in this same place, eating, no doubt, from the same berry patch. Once you smell a bear you never forget its earthy, rotten acorn and mossy-musk scent. I made some ridiculous bear whoops and we carried on our way but the bear was probably already long gone. The trail began to descend gradually and the woods opened up. So did the ground.
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| Mine shaft ramp. |
There were literally dozens of shaft ditches that led to ore tunnels deep inside the mountain. All are closed off now for safety but I did see one that had fallen open to reveal a dark hole and there the air spilled out cold and misty into the humidity. The ore mines sometimes reached hundreds of yards deep into the shoulder of the mountain. Men and boys worked the cramped veins to extract heavy chunks of rock then hauled it by push cart and mule wagon to the surface. The more I studied the landscape around me the more shaft entrances I saw with their wagon-wide ramps ending abruptly in walls of collapsed earth.
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| Turn left down the Dixon Road Trail |
At last I found the turn-off on to the Dixon Trail, also an old mining road. We descended along the pitted and gouged shoulder of the mountain. Everywhere were piles of mine tailings, waste heaps of rock, and wagon paths leading down the hill. All of it lay beneath a century's growth of old forest - Red Oak, Hemlock, and Yellow Birch. The ground was cloaked in fern and moss and dead leaves. I tried to imagine the sounds of the working landscape: the braying of mules, the hollering workers, and the clank of hammers, shovels, and picks. These banks were worked heavily until 1904 when the last blast was fired up at the furnace now three miles away but the final whistle to end the final day was heard all the way to this place as the miners and diggers put down their tools for the last time.
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| Spoil heaps were everywhere |
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| Turn left! |
The Dixon Trail leveled out at the intersection with the Tramway Trail that follows the path of the mule-and-wagon railway that took us back to where we started our circuit. Again the rain poured down, but with more light than dark I spent time observing the plants along the old rail cut. In places the rails had been supported by sandstone columns through boggy hollows and spring seeps. I scraped some moss off a displaced block of stone and studied some fossil imprints: a crinoid stem section and worm burrows were visible beneath discs of lichen. Amos took a break to snuffle around an upturned root ball and I watched a bumble bee pollinate a patch of Ghost Pipe.
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| Dressed sandstone block complete with fossil imprints. |
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| A bumble bee sipping from an inverted Ghost Pipe flower |
We were very near Greenwood Road which ran parallel to the Tramway Trail. Trucks and cars zoomed loudly over the wet pavement below us and made more noise than I had heard all day. I could see the tops of a few camps and homes as the trail skirted the backs of properties, behind barns, and playing fields. A beeyard close to the trail lay in ruin from a bear visit with its hive supers and lids lying all about, clawed apart and rotting on the ground. The beekeeper must have given up after the raid and not come back to reclaim his or her yard last year.
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| Following the path of the tramway |
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| Moss-covered sandstone piers that supported rails over seeps |
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| Clymene Moth, Haploa clymene |
We came to the intersection of the Dogtown Trail and Tramway and took a right, down again across Standing Stone Creek where the last Rhododendrons were blooming arching over the shady bank. Windswept was again on my mind as we ambled into camp. I changed out of my wet clothes, boots, and socks into drier garb and settled in to read more about women who walked. Amos dug a nest in the leaves and had a good earthy nap.
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| Amos in a nest of leaves behind Site #50 |
Notes:
Greenwood Furnace State Park which is one of my favorite basecamps for exploring Rothrock State Forest. Purple Lizard Maps has an excellent map of the area which I use extensively. https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark/GreenwoodFurnaceStatePark/Pages/default.aspx
Adam Cohen's article "Greenwood Furnace: Iron, Trees, and a State Park" presents the industrial history for the furnace and its surrounding town and community, all of which is now a National Historic Site.
https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/greenwood-furnace-iron-trees-and-state-park Review of
Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (2021) by Annabel Abbs in MS Magazine. I really love this book.
https://msmagazine.com/2022/02/04/windswept-walking-the-paths-of-trailblazing-women-book-review/
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