The stone church at Greenwood Furnace

The church at Greenwood Furnace is a one-story building of rubble stone, gable end to the road, with a side entrance porch and a cross-gabled cupola. The Historic American Engineering Record photographed it as one part of its Greenwood Furnace survey. Its own data pages are a single cover sheet; the written history belongs to the parent survey, compiled by Gray Fitzsimons and Kenneth Rose, which cites an interview with the park superintendent in July 1988, dates the church to 1865 and lists it, with the cemetery, among the structures that survive from the years of iron production.

Two older histories fill in what the cover sheet leaves out. Jordan's 1913 History of the Juniata Valley and its People says Methodist churches were built in 1865 at Loysville, Ennisville and Greenwood Furnace, and that the Greenwood Furnace church, a substantial stone structure, was not dedicated until 1867. J. Simpson Africa, writing in 1883 while the furnace was still in blast, listed a good schoolhouse and a fine Methodist church among the things that made Greenwood an attractive mountain village.

The 1989 National Register nomination for Greenwood Furnace describes the building as it stood then: gable front facing Route 305, the door on the eastern side four-paneled with a fanlight above, six-over-six windows in front and nine-over-nine on the sides, cleaned and repointed in 1980. The county's 1991 inventory of historic engineering and industrial sites remarks that documents place schools and churches at many of the county's iron works but that almost none survive, and names the Civil War-era stone church at Greenwood as one of the exceptions.

The survey says the stacks, church and cemetery are maintained as historic sites and interpreted for park visitors. The cemetery lies four tenths of a mile west of the church on the south side of Route 305. The nomination says two Revolutionary War and several Civil War veterans are known to have been buried there, and that its limestone markers do not lie in a regular arrangement.

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

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