Barree Forge, the ironworks across the river from Barree

On the north bank of the Little Juniata, opposite the village of Barree and two miles north of Alexandria, a field holds the remains of an early ironworks. In the 1790s Edward Bartholomew bought land there and, with his son in law Greenberry Dorsey, put up Barree Forge. The nomination puts the purchase in 1795; J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history says the spring of 1794 and names the seller as Lazarus Brown McLane. The forge took its name from old Barree Township, which held it until West Township was formed in 1798, and the nomination calls it the earliest ironworks in northern Huntingdon County. Africa writes that its pig metal came from Centre Furnace for many years.

Dorsey, then his widow and son, ran the forge until 1834, when his son in law S. Miles Green, with Edward B. Dorsey and others, took it on as Dorsey, Green & Co. The same group ran Union and Mill Creek furnaces. Green was ironmaster into the 1860s, and his sons, Joseph and G. Dorsey, were each briefly designated ironmaster. The old forge gave way to larger ones more than once, and in 1864, with the Civil War raising demand, a furnace was added. In the 1870s the Dorsey heirs sold to A. L. Mumper of Bethlehem, who died in 1875; his widow and young son John carried on into the 1880s. The nomination says the works was liberally capitalized and in one family's hands for almost its whole life, and calls it one of the area's most productive iron businesses.

After the ironworks closed in the 1880s the owners cleared away the workers' houses and the forge and furnace buildings. The nomination counts three buildings spared: a brick house of the 1830s that had been the ironmaster's residence and later a store and post office, a second mansion, and the large barn. Africa records a Barree Forge post office from 1853, with the proprietors usually serving as postmasters. The furnace stack of 1864, thirty feet square in coursed limestone, stood six to fifteen feet high in 1989, its casting and tuyere arches intact. The property had by then been the summer camp of the Central Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church for twenty years, and in the field, piles of slag, depressions, and the stone and concrete remains of a dam on McClain's Run marked where the forge had stood.

The forge was improved and expanded repeatedly, and a furnace was added to the operation in 1864, during the brief ripple of excitement which Civil War demands caused at area ironworks.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Barree Forge and Furnace (reference 90000405), section 8, continuation page 2 (PDF page 6) · character 9,558 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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