Jackson township

330 Acres a Year

A Greenwood Furnace stack, which Myer Souders labels Stack No. 2Shared by Myer Souders

Did you know? The furnaces at Greenwood ran on charcoal, and it took around 330 acres of forest a year to make it.

Colliers burned the wood on hearths to make the charcoal, the state park's history says, and hundreds of those hearths can still be found in the park and on the hillsides around it. Look for large, flat circles where little grows.

Two stacks stood there. The ruins of the first, from about 1834, are about fifteen feet high. The second, built in 1868, is a thirty foot stack of coursed sandstone blocks, and the Civilian Conservation Corps reconstructed it in 1936, leaving its four arches open to walk through.

Myer Souders shared this photograph, which he labels Stack No. 2 at Greenwood Furnace, and he reminds us how hard those furnaces were on our forests.

Checked and confirmed. CONFIRMED 2026-10-09 against the sources listed: every factual sentence was tied to a verbatim passage and a script confirmed each passage is in its source. Information shared with us by readers is given as theirs, not as fact: Myer Souders.

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