PA Horseshoe Trail: Warwick County Park and the Memory of Landscape

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places and desecrated places.  

- Wendell Berry

This week I hiked a section of the Horseshoe Trail in Warwick County Park south of St. Peter's and five miles southeast of last week's trek through French Creek State Park.  The Horseshoe Trail runs from Valley Forge near Philadelphia to the Appalachian Trail at Stony Mountain north of Fort Indiantown Gap for a total of 140 miles.

140 miles from Valley Forge to the AT - Iron Country.

With a tight weekend schedule of writing, revising, and a predicted winter/spring defense of my environmental history dissertation, I know my weekend hiking dates will be limited so I figured I'd organize my hiking dates along the HST by hiking in the parks that it passes through. By concentrating on the parks I can learn more about those particular environmental histories as compared to just passing through. I decided to start in the middle at French Creek State Park last week and work my way southeast then northwest through the fall and winter. 

Entrance on County Park Road. Warwick Woods on ridge behind.

The path of the HST is much like the Mason Dixon Trail in that it traverses well-populated as well as wilder remote areas. Some road walking, lots of woods walking, and most of it across a vast hilly foothill region that helped forge a nation. Emphasis on the word forge. Everywhere you drive in this area of Chester County there are forge and furnace ruins! Several iron masters mansions loom over the valley at several rural crossroads. It's a big part of our colonial and post-colonial history!

Thomas Lightfoot, surveyor, Warwick Iron Plantation Tract. Credit: Pennsylvania State Archives

This is a landscape that had been transformed from wilderness to full-on industrial to a kind of semi-wild. Clues abound in this landscape as to its former uses. But people think differently about landscapes depending upon their experiences of them. I happen to love the human-nature history interface, and (though some people find it odd) I am very interested in how industrial landscapes revert to nature. I hiked out from the park office at Warwick County Park along the HST to the forge marker at Coventry, then looped back along the North Loop Trail, retraced my way a little bit on the HST, then bobbed up the Charcoal and Iron Heritage Trails for the return.  It was an 8 mile hike that covered the whole park.

My turn-around point at the marker for Coventry Forge.

My early start meant  I was the only one in the park except for park ranger Lisa. She said that some visitors come here to experience the park's industrial history and carefully look for ruins of mills, bridges, quarry pits, and old roads, while others are here to enjoy the natural history. "People from urban environments may think it "untouched wilderness" or "pristine" while others may see it as managed or manipulated," she said, "I just find it fascinating that every trail follows a path previously made by someone else for some other purpose. No new trails were built here except for the paved nature trail for handicapped accessibility."  

Yellow blaze on the wagon road to the forge.

I agreed with her. The land speaks differently to everyone. The theme for me today (although an unintentional one)  was how people move through this landscape - on an old railroad bed, charcoal roads, auto roads, deer trails, farm lanes, logging paths, river trails (dating back thousands of years). How we move through a landscape often influences how we come to know it, orient to it, and learn of its past. Who decides how we move through a landscape determines the penalties for misusing it. Judging by the fleet of law enforcement vehicles parked at the office, it was pretty clear who enforces the rules!

Horseshoe Trail - Iron History Trail - Charcoal Trail intersection.

I fitting a new pack so to work on the adjustments I took the paved nature trail first. It took me down to French Creek and a nice fishing dock. These are cold trout waters. Bluebirds were everywhere and a red-tailed hawk that they noisily announced. Once I had the straps and buckles adjusted, I headed up the hill to find the HST and a well-marked system of other trails. 

Fishermen's trails follow the edge of French Creek.

The loggers here now are beavers and an attentive trail crew.

I wondered what residents and workers of the 1700s would have thought about this valley becoming a park? Busy roads transformed into walking paths. An equestrian trail? Weren't all roads for horses back then? Horses were the real muscle behind the iron industry, so the idea that a special trail just for them (and us hikers) may have been a stretch of the colonial imagination - all roads were for horses!

Pony cart drive on a lovely Sunday morning.

Pennsylvania as a governing colonial body played a big part in promoting and encouraging forays into the wilderness to establish the major extractive industries in lumbering, mining, and stone quarries.  During the Revolutionary War and in the century that followed, no other state offered as much in mineral and natural wealth as did Pennsylvania towards the building of a new nation and world power. I could only imagine the sound of hooves and wagons pounding these roads, day and night. A  cart driver and his partner told a story about a third great grandfather who was the Coventry Village doctor. "He used the pony cart all the time. It was the quickest way to maneuver these heavily traveled woods roads to get to some of the more remote farms and homes."

Draft horse and sawyers. Photo: Hopewell NHS Archives.

Just a few miles of where I hike today, one hundred Continental 'Great Guns' were produced at Hopewell Furnace. At the end of this valley where the Warwick Furnace was once located (its all ruins now) the cannon shot for those cannons was made. Considering many of these furnaces and forges were in operation decades before the Revolution, the early and long-term impact on these foothills is extensive but nearly invisible to the untrained eye.  I happened to see a photo-essay of WWI battlefields in France as they look today - shut off from public use and farming because of high levels of arsenic and unexploded munitions. I wonder how the Iron Hills landscape fares three hundred and fifty years later - whether there are toxins and chemical legacies still to contend with?

Charcoal pit - one among dozens where nothing grows.

For those not used to spotting centuries-old relics of the industrial landscape, Warwick County Park has erected a wonderful set of wayside interpretive signs to tell the story and mark locations. I found it interesting that nothing grows in the old charcoal hearths called 'pits.'  I passed dozens of unmarked pits on the way to Coventry Forge, circles of flat land thirty feet or so in diameter. I dug a little with my hiking poles and quickly found charred ground and bits of charcoal. A good hearth pit was used for generations.

Collier and assistants, from a Iron Heritage Trail wayside.

The wayside signs made envisioning the valley at its height of industry easy. One only had to look at a picture or sketch, turn all the way around and study the landscape, and land forms pictured on the signs aligned with the photos and renderings. I continued down the HST with my minds-eye full of a full of colliers and sawyers and surveyors. A yellow-shafted flicker, brown creeper, and downy woodpecker had me pulling up my binoculars and suddenly I was back in a 21st century forest!

Collier (on top) and assistants. Photo: Hopewell NHS Archives.

Stacking cordwood for a burn. Photo: Hopewell NHS Archives.

At my snack break at the Coventry Forge marker, I studied a larger map of the region. Besides the physical alterations of the land (charcoal pits, quarries, ore banks, furnaces) what invisible but environmentally persistent features might there be? Abandoned mines leach toxins into hydrological systems altered long ago for mill races, canals, wells, and mill ponds. I got a little chill thinking about these recovering forests that are never as sedately 'natural' as a heritage park would have you believe. This is where those informative wayside interpretive signs are very misleading. And, the defunct 20th century  iron industry landscape is dynamic, still in transition. The Warwick Furnace in 1900 was a much different operation than it was during the Revolution, with all its attendant toxic legacies.

Horseshoe Trail on a mill race path - race is to the left.

Backtracking from the forge site I realized that the HST was following an old mill race path. The hand-dug race was snug up against the path and in places where the race must have burst through the embankment, the trail was a slog. Lots of rock hopping and a failed attempt to cross the creek sent me back the way I came.

North Loop Trail follows the Sowbelly Line RR bed for about a mile.

I circled back and found the blue-blazed North Loop Trail. The first mile is on the old bed of the Sowbelly Railroad, a small line that connected iron villages like St. Peters Knauertown, Coventry, and Kimberton. The little short line was all that there was of a largely unsuccessful Delaware River and Lancaster RR that never seemed to raise enough money to complete tracks to NYC. So local entrepreneurs like Davis Knauer bought one of the finished sections and put it into rural service in 1890 but it quickly succumbed to the national agricultural depression of 1893 and closed. Each section of the trail system in the park has its own story and place in history. 

French Creek overlook from the North Loop Trail

The park has reclaimed many of the old pastures along the North Loop, planted them in native Eastern prairie grass and wildflowers. Big bluestem grass was punctuated by thick stands of milkweed, critical for the monarch butterfly. I heard a report just the other day that the precipitous decline in monarch numbers appears to be reversing as hundreds of thousands more butterflies are being observed in their wintering grounds in Central America. The radio report claimed that planting milkweed has made a huge contribution in this recovery.

Old stone house ruin.

Locust tree in full thorn armor!

Another two miles on the North Loop and I road-walked back to the HST intersection and backtracked a little bit before jumping on to the white-blazed Charcoal Trail. Those interpretive signs are really beautiful!

Great interpretive signs along the Iron Heritage Trail

The trail climbed a steep pitch to even out just below the ridge on a charcoal road carved into the slope. Someone was burning leaves up on the Warwick Furnace Road and it gave the air a blue tint that I can imagine was fifty times as thick during the charcoal burns. Now high above the valley at about 500' I could see through the forest to the French Creek bottom below. An eagle flew above the red and chestnut oaks flashing his bright white tail in the low-angle sunlight.

A charcoal road that connects a dozen pits.

In decline since the 1860s, new technologies replaced the old charcoal-fired furnaces and cheaper product could be made at the larger anthracite forges in Steelton and Reading. Some local furnaces like the the Warwick Furnaces transitioned to newer technologies, too, but as the huge ore mines opened in the Upper Great Lake states to feed the giant plants in large port cities, inland furnaces suffered. So when I looked across the valley from the Warwick Woods I wondered where the memories go when an industry hundreds of years old retires? There are lots of historical societies, archives, and museums around to tell the factual chronological history, but what about the memory of landscape? 

Polypore on oak stump.

In 1810 alone these Iron Hills produced 27,000 tons of iron and consumed 4,100 acres of forest. The age of the iron plantations was at its pinnacle.  Anna Nutt, a strong and very smart Quaker business woman, built the Warwick Furnace in 1737. By the pinnacle years of the early 1800s this valley was thrumming. These were her woods and largely to her credit were some of the most carefully managed forest lands in the region.

B. Henry Latrose on his travels through Pennsylvania painted this watercolor of Warwick Furnace in 1803. Warwick Woods is seen on the ridge behind (Warwick County Park).

Surveyors carefully cordoned off sections to be timbered each year with no cutting bordering on another. The woods were harvested in a checkerboard pattern so that logged over acres could recover over many 'rest' years with seed stock coming from mature plots  nearby. Following the Revolution, her furnace produced the Franklin home heating stove and during the Civil War the iron plates used in the battleship Monitor were cast here. But unlike many once wooded regions that fed the industry to exhaustion, the Warwick Woods actually retained its woods!

A closed charcoal road.

The downriver Conventry Forge, in operation since 1717, and the Warwick Furnace upstream would sometimes cast the entire valley in a red-orange glow at night.The eerie blue smokes of the charcoal hearths combined with the fiery skies of the blasts at Hopewell and Warwick must have been spectral. By the end of the century the Warwick Furnace was in full industrial production and all of the smaller furnaces and forges out of business unable to compete against this iron-making giant that used modern technology, fuels, and machinery.

Warwick Furnace, circa 1900, Chester Co. PA.  Credit: Pennsylvania State Archives

Now, under clear blue skies I finished my hike in the midst of a strong, vibrant forest. But I couldn't just walk out without looking back.  I realized that the memory of the landscape is  held in the lay of land, the robustness of these woods, and in the dip-and-glide flight of the woodpeckers that seemed everywhere all at once. Though the sun was setting fast, I stood for some time and just enjoyed the view.  Looking down into the valley below I wrote in my hiking journal:

The quality of light is intense, piercing.

We're now in 'stick season' and I can see through these thick woods

to the creek below.

Everything is reflected back to me.

Road from Coventry Village to Knauertown through the Warwick Woods.

Notes:

Horseshoe Trail website:  http://hstrail.org/

Fellow doctoral candidate in environmental history, John Baeten, has started his own blog of industrial landscapes and their environmental histories.  These are the Great Lakes ore landscapes that put the smaller Pennsylvania industries out of business. http://www.industriallandscapes.org/

PA Horseshoe Trail, French Creek State Park

I want to hike all of the parks that the Horseshoe Trail passes through so I started this weekend with French Creek State Park about thirty miles north of Philadelphia. I did a big loop up and around Williams Hill where a State Lands Firefighting Unit is based, then down to Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. I ran out of hiking time and drove the remaining four miles  St. Peter's Company Town (listed on the National Register of Historic Places). The day's total mileage was 8.5 miles, give or take a few tumbles.

The start of my French Creek State Park loop.

All the leaves that were on the trees last week are now on the ground. This made for some very tricky footing heading up and down Williams Hill. The trail follows old charcoal wagon roads and is deeply gullied in many places. That's bad enough as it is, but add a foot of fresh oak leaves to cover all the rocks and cobbles and you've got a heck of an ankle twisting hike. I stumbled and fell several times and would have done so a hundred times more if I hadn't been hiking with my poles. I met two groups on the hill trails and everyone was complaining about twisted ankles and pulled tendons.

Ruby-crowned Kinglet.

The sound of fresh leaves kicking up under foot was so loud that I had to stop several times just to listen to the quiet. I encountered several energetic mixed winter flocks, with the titmouse pair always in charge. A very active Ruby-Crowned Kinglet could have cared less about me being just a few feet from where he was foraging. My one good bird picture of the day!

Orienteering post.

Coming down off of Williams Hill, I heard a man yell. Like really loud. I couldn't tell where he was as the sound of leaves rustling under my boots made it hard to catch every bad word he was saying - loudly. I came upon the intersection of the Horseshoe and Boone Trails and found him there in the gully that is the trail with his running shoe off. With no ankle protection he rolled off a hidden rock and twisted his foot under him as he fell. OUCH! His wife was tending to a wrap of duct tape over a bandana to try to stiffen the joint for the walk down. He refused any more help (he was very embarrassed and taking out on her) so I continued on my way down. Within minutes I had pinched a tendon in my ankle, thankful I had my high topped backpacking boots on! It could have been a fall with more serious consequences.

Hopewell Lake.

Now on the Boone Trail I wandered into a group camping area with old CCC-era sleeping cabins and a beautiful camp hall and kitchen much like the one my mother managed when we were growing up on a summer camp property. My dad was the caretaker there and for nine months we had 600 acres of hills, cabins, the hall, great kitchen and creek to ourselves. We had wonderful family gatherings there in the off season including Thanksgiving dinners for a hundred people! When I came upon the hall at French Creek I was flooded with happy memories and stood there looking at it for a very long time.

A wonderful flood of memories when I came upon this camp hall and kitchen!

I reached a smooth gravel road and walking became easier on that sore right ankle. I met the couple from up top as he limped off the trail further down the road. He looked to be in quite a bit of pain. I offered to hike back to the parking lot with them and give him some Ibuprofen I keep in my car (hikers candy!) so we walked slowly along. He wasn't complaining as much, but clearly not having his best day. We arrived at the parking lot on the lake and I fetched the pills (and took two myself!). I said goodbye, then continued on to follow the lakeshore trail towards Hopewell Furnace. Like many of my hikes in Pennsylvania, I have to remember that these were industrial landscapes. Even without the historic buildings and wayside interpretive signs, the clues of this area's iron mining past are all around me.

CCC-built 1935 spillway to Hopewell Lake. Very birdy!

Out on the lake were buffleheads and mallards. Canada Geese came in to land by the hundreds! I crossed the spillway and found the cattail meadow below the dam to be very birdy with White-Throated Sparrows, Robins, Mockingbirds, Winter Wrens, more Kinglets, Juncos, Titmice, and a Fox Sparrow!  The path became another wagon road, but this one is kept well by the park and is wide and flat. The yellow blazes turned into yellow horseshoes as I entered Hopewell Furnace National Historic Village.

What would have been a busy crossroad is now a National Heritage Trail.

The path leads past many relics: an old anthracite furnace ruins, a collier's hut, the foundation of a charcoal house. Of course I had to explore e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. I dawdled and wandered and poked my head in here and there. Great stuff this history business!  And great geology too! This hilly region is part of the complex of hills that connects to an earlier hike at Middle Creek WMA a few weeks ago. The iron ore region of South Central and Southeastern PA extends in an arc across the state and defines the south edge of a huge rift basin known as the Gettysburg and Newark Basins. The underlying rock types and geology have everything to do with the ecosystems of these hills.

Anthracite furnace ruins.

Anthracite ruins and the big blob of iron left in the middle of the furnace crucible.

There are mines, quarry pits, charcoal pits (or circles), tailings piles, borrow pits, cut stone waste, and old roads everywhere, but this is iron country through and through. Known as the Schuylkill Hills, this region was logged for its hardwoods, chestnut, red and white oaks, to make charcoal to fuel the iron forges and furnaces. Just inside the Hopewell Furnace NHS is a set of waysides that explain the charcoal making process (the old pictures shown here were taken from those panels). A collier's hut stands nearby.

Cordwood stacked to make charcoal.

Making charcoal involved teams of men - loggers, sawyers, drovers, and the collier and his assistant. This guy had to be one tough cookie! The cordwood was stacked precisely around a chimney, layer upon layer stacked leaning into the center, until the mound was twenty feet across. The collier would set the mound afire and allow it to burn hot for a short while before covering it with dirt and wet leaves. It was left to smolder, 'charring' the wood inside.

Colliers hut.

As the stacked wood slowly collapsed the collier would rake off some of the covering, very carefully. If the mound began to show yellow smoke up through the chimney it meant the wood was too hot, so it was covered again. This required the collier and his assistant to climb all over the mound risking a cave-in at any time to cover and uncover the mound, always watching for the proper blue smoke to indicate that charcoal was forming inside.

The last collier at Hopewell.

The collier and his assistant minded the pit day and night to keep it at proper temperature. A simple earthen hut was built at each set of mounds so that the men had a place to rest and eat their meals. No sleep for anyone until the mound was reduced to charwood, though. It was messy, smoky, and very hot work. The cool of the hut must have felt like heaven. When all was done the charcoal was raked open and cooled then shoveled cold into the charcoal wagons for the trip to the furnace. Acres and acres of oak were consumed every day the furnace was in blast - week upon week of roaring blast. It was loud and dangerous business. 

Water wheel pumping the bellows that fire the furnace.

The trail winds right through the iron furnace village, past workers homes, the iron master's home, the company store, and draft animal barn. Horses were the most important part of such a large operation. The hauled everything - wagons of slag away from the furnace, pig iron and castings to the forges and shops, ore, limestone, and charcoal to the furnace.Today there are two token heavy horses on the grounds as well as two big oxen, also very important to hauling and logging. 

This is one very heavy (and kissable) draft horse!

Charcoal wagons ran along the charcoal roads throughout the region.

 The Hopewell Furnace is one of the finest preserved examples of 19th century iron industry. It's covered walkway leads from the charcoal barn where the wagons would line up. Ore, limestone, and charcoal were dumped into the stack from above. Below the blast master maintained constant watch on the process. Explosions were not common but when they did occur, men died and buildings were destroyed. The eerie glow of blast at night filled the valley.

Hopewell Furnace House.

The hearth at the base of the crucible.

The sound of the large waterwheel cranking on its giant oaken axle and the whoooshing of the large bellows was a constant backdrop to the roar of the furnace. Men shouting, horses whinnying, the creak and crunch of wagons wheels on slag roads - it must have been deafening to work in close proximity to the furnace. Closest of all was the iron master himself, who lived in a fine mansion a few hundred yards from the furnace. When an emergency occurred he was right there to tend to it.

Iron Master's House and draft animal barn behind.

The day I hiked through, Hopewell Furnace was brimming with young Mennonite men and women. Unlike the 'English' visitors who seemed preoccupied with their smart phones and taking gads of pictures, the Mennonite men in particular studied every aspect of the village. The young women visited the workers homes and spend happy time with the heavy horses.

Mennonite boys inspect the sand casting area.

I thought about all the different kinds of people who must have worked here. The furnace operated from 1771 to 1883 and employed many free black men and women as well as slaves early on. Though the original Iron Master, Mark Bird, owned around 20 enslaved people, after 1780 slavery on the whole in Pennsylvania declined rapidly when the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered an emancipation that year. Quakers in the area assisted run-away slaves from the south through the area during the 1800s until the mid-1860s. Many took to living in the rocky hills near here where men found work in the forest as sawyers and colliers. There are several small African American communities nearby at Joanna and Six Penny Creek, remnants from freedman's communities of the late 1800s, and carefully tended cemeteries bear the headstones of the African American men and their families who worked in area quarries, mines, and at the furnace itself.

Tallus slope on the edge of French Creek State Park and Hopewell NHS.

Large oxen graze in the meadow. Beyond them is a railway.

The most notable item manufactured here at the village was the Hopewell Furnace woodstove. Every home and office, store and shop in the area had at least one. Many were sold in Reading and Philadelphia. I stopped in at the workers homes and the park Visitor Center to look closely at the fine castings that when assembled panel by panel became beautiful stoves.  The furnace buildings contain castings tables, frames, and mold boards. On special weekends the craft of sand casting is demonstrated.

Heating by wood in a workers home.

Cast panels for assembly into a variety of stoves.

A museum piece - Hopewell Stove at the Visitor's Center.

While at the Visitor's Center I did my time check and decided it was time to reverse course and head back around the lake to return to my car. The sun was getting low and I was a little worried about a tire that had gone flat on the day before. I'd had it plugged, but still - I didn't want to find out the hard way on a dark, narrow Pennsylvania road that might need to be replaced after all.

Under the surface of the leaves - a million rocks!

I stumbled and tripped back along a charcoal road, my ankle reminding me that I'd need to take another Ibuprofen before bed. I decided I had just enough late afternoon sun to make the few miles drive to St. Peter's Company Town. This is where all the local mines, furnaces, and forges sent their products to be shipped to the cities north, east, west, and south along the Wilmington and Northern or Delaware and Lancaster railroads that converged here. An industrial village since 1845, it ceased to be a mining and industry center in the late 1970s. Thankfully the forge and quarry owners had the foresight to preserve the town under historic ordinance and petitioned to have it added to the Register of Historic Places.

St. Peter's Company Town.

Up the hill behind the town is the great stone quarry pit, now safely fenced off, with one of its many derricks visible just at the top in the woods. As is true where I live in the slate region of southern Pennsylvania, the open quarry pits have been too attractive to local youth over the years. The cold waters of a deep quarry lake can be too hard to resist on a hot, humid summer day and some young folks have died diving here. Even though this pit is now fenced off with a nine-foot chain link barrier, there are dozens of smaller and remote lake pits scattered all over the region and its a talk that many parents have with their teenagers, to be safe and sober when exploring around them. I'll admit to having swum in the slate quarries of Delta in my high school years, but after losing a friend to a diving accident at one when I was twenty, I keep away.

The Big Pit at St. Peter's Company Town.

Iron forge and assembly plant at St. Peter's Company Town.

The sun was getting low (and I prayed my plugged tire was not) so I finished my exploring and headed back to the large parking area north of the town. I looked down into the French Creek Ravine where hikers explored the large diabase boulder field that almost blocks the river. An erosive landscape of ravine and down-cutting streams, the creek slowly ate away the surrounding soft rock that held the instrusive igneous dikes of magmatic trap rock during Triassic times, popping large boulders out of the ravine walls over millions of years and smoothing them over time with the weathering action of water and ice.

Diabase boulders, French Creek Ravine.

Now the creek bed is a maze of tumbled, jumbled boulders. Though fossils are hard to find in this area, there are some outcrops of plant and animal fossil-bearing rock within the park. 200 million year old dinosaur tracks have been found within the Gettysburg and Newark Basins not far from here. But looking down in to the ravine from the porches and ledge gardens of the quaint homes and beautiful inn and bakery here, I can imagine the fantastic animals that once roamed these hills.

Beautiful ledge garden over the ravine.

Notes:

The geological and mining report for Hopewell Furnace and French Creek State Park can be found here. Very interesting reading!
http://nature.nps.gov/geology/inventory/publications/reports/hofu_gri_rpt_view.pdf

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site webpage:
http://www.nps.gov/hofu/index.htm

French Creek State Park. Print your trail maps from this website! There are no maps available in the park. There are over 30 miles of hiking trails available here and that link to other trails, including the Horseshoe Trail. You could spend a week in this park!
http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/stateparks/findapark/frenchcreek/