Rockhill

The machine shop at Rockhill Furnace is the building the East Broad Top Railroad used to repair its own locomotives. The Historic American Engineering Record filed its photographs and drawings of the shop as HAER PA-127-A; the written history is in the parent report on the shop complex, PA-127, by historian Matthew Kierstead, from documentation begun in 1989 and continued in 1994.

That report says the railroad bought the T. E. Orbison farm in 1872 as the site for its shops, and that the shops grew around an 1867 stone farmhouse that served as the first office. On April 15, 1878, the board of directors recorded that sending locomotives to Baldwin's for repairs had proved expensive and unsatisfactory, and that the Pennsylvania Railroad had agreed to do the work at Altoona. By the summer of 1881 the East Broad Top was buying tools for a new machine shop. The T-shaped core of the wood frame, board-and-batten building, powered by a single boiler, was apparently finished in November or December of 1881 with an engine repair area inside it. In 1882 the board noted that engines could now be repaired in two or three days instead of a month to six weeks.

In what the survey calls the Seibert era the main shop floor was roughly doubled in length, and the survey reads the patent dates on the machines as suggesting a major purchase of new machinery just after the turn of the century. Two 100 horsepower Babcock and Wilcox boilers were installed in that period, feeding a steam engine said to have come from the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company plant, which turns a belt-driven lineshaft system of nearly three dozen separate shafts running machinery in the machine shop, blacksmith shop and foundry. The 1991 county inventory lists the machine shop with a foundry, blacksmith shop, boiler shop, car shop, electrician's shop and supply shed.

The entire holdings of the Rockhill Coal Company, the railroad among them, were sold to the Kovalchick company of Indiana, Pennsylvania, on May 1, 1956. When the survey team looked at the buildings in 1994, the machine shop roof had been elaborately shored up.

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The East Broad Top Railroad's shops stand on Meadow Street in Rockhill Furnace, a middle point on a three-foot-gauge line that ran from Mount Union to Alvan. The nomination calls the railroad one of the oldest narrow gauge lines in America, and a 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's industrial sites records that it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

The nomination says the East Broad Top Railroad and Coal Company was established in 1871, after the Civil War interfered with an earlier plan to reach the Broad Top coal. Africa's 1883 county history says the company had been organized under an act approved April 16, 1856, that construction began on September 16, 1872, and that the road opened to Robertsdale, its southern terminus, on November 4, 1874. The 1991 inventory says the owners of Rockhill Furnace built the line to reach iron ore and coal in the region, and that it reached its greatest length in 1916 with the extension to Alvan. The road carried timber, sand, rock, general freight and passengers, but coal was its great money-maker: trains hauled it to Mount Union, where it was transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1881, Africa records, the road carried 143,449 tons of bituminous coal.

After World War II other fuels began to supplant coal. Passenger service ended in 1953, and on April 16, 1956, the company ran its last train. The purchaser of the entire line preserved five miles of track and six steam locomotives, Mikado types built for the East Broad Top by the Baldwin works of Philadelphia, and began running part of the line as a tourist attraction in 1960. The 1991 inventory names the buyer as the Kovalchick Salvage Company of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and says the town of Orbisonia asked for the reopening to commemorate its bicentennial.

The bulk of the Rockhill yard dates from 1874, including the red brick roundhouse with berths for eight engines and the Armstrong turntable. When the form was written in 1974 the blacksmith shop, foundry and machine and car shops still housed their original machinery, and the foundry was filled with patterns used in making the rolling stock. About 1,400 feet of grade north of Shirleysburg washed out in 1972. Across Meadow Street, the Orbisonia passenger station had its waiting room converted into a gift shop and its freight room into a snack bar.

Decline in the use of coal after World War II forced the East Broad Top to cease operations in 1956. All of its track and rolling stock seemed doomed, but the purchaser of the line generously preserved five miles of the track and six of the steam engines.National Register of Historic Places nomination, East Broad Top Railroad (reference 66000666), 66000666, p. 3 · character 7,078 of the scanned text

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The foundry at the East Broad Top shops in Rockhill Furnace is where the railroad cast its own iron and brass. The Historic American Engineering Record filed its measured drawings and photographs of the building as HAER PA-127-D, and the written history sits in the parent report on the shop complex, PA-127.

That report cites the board of directors' minute of September 15, 1885, agreeing to erect a foundry at Rockhill. Like the machine shop and blacksmith shop beside it, the foundry was a wood frame building with board-and-batten siding. Inside, the survey describes a shop-built, coke-fired iron melting cupola driven by a twenty-four inch blower, and a natural-draft crucible furnace for melting brass, used for non-ferrous castings and locomotive brasses. In what the survey calls the Seibert era the foundry was greatly expanded: a pattern shop was built north of the coal-fired core oven, and a two-story charging deck was added at the south end, with a pneumatic crane and storage bins above and a casting tumbler and iron scrap bin below. The survey singles out an 1878 wooden-frame foundry crane made by Perrottet and Hoyt as one of the oldest pieces of original equipment on the site.

The Library of Congress record for the building says it has not operated since the East Broad Top stopped running in 1956 and remains in essentially original condition.

The foundry cast for more than the railroad. It supplied castings to the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company mines, and the survey found tagged patterns on the patternmaker's bench for outside customers, among them a pulley pattern for the Pennsylvania Glass Sand Company at Mapleton, near Mount Union, and a simple farmer's plow blade.

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Nobody flew over Orbisonia in 1906. The bird's eye view was a commercial art form: an artist walked the streets, drew every building, and then assembled them into a perspective nobody had ever actually seen. Fowler and Kelly made this one of the two boroughs together, and the Library of Congress holds it. It is a perspective map, not drawn to scale, which means the buildings are real and the geometry is persuasion.

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From the county histories, on Rockhill borough. The passage below is printed exactly as it appears in 1883, including the spelling of the day and the errors the scanner made. It has not been rewritten, summarised or added to.

From the west are several small streams flowing into Aughwick Creek, the largest of which is Old Woman's Run, which empties into the Aughwick a little below the mouth of Black Log. The East Broad Top Railroad passes through the township nearly northeast and southwest, alongside the borough of Orbisonia, and through the town of Rock Hill. There are under the surface of Cromwell township large quantities of iron ore, both hematite and fossil, principally owned by the Rock Hill Iron and Coal Company, whose furnaces are located just outside the borough of Orbisonia. The farming lands of this township, scattered as they are through the small valleys, are susceptible of a high state of eultivation, and upon some are raised large crops of corn, wheat, oats, and potatoes. Early Settlers and Pioneer Incidents. , This township being on the old path from the lower Susquehanna to the Ohio country, and a portion of the gap or gateway through which many of the pioneers to the then far-off West journeyed, it would naturally attract the attention of some of the pilgrims in search of future homes. Of this class were ` THE CLUGAGE FAMILY., This family of pioneers settled in Black Log, which was sometimes called Horse Valley, about the year 1763, and consisted of Robert, the father, who died a few years thereafter, and sons named respectively Robert, George, Thomas, Francis, James, and Gaven, each of whom became owners of land in the valley between the Shade and Black Log Gaps.J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883) · character 1,637,971 of the scanned text

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