East Broad Top Railroad Foundry, Rockhill Furnace

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.

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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