Greenwood Furnace, Stack No. 2

Five miles east of McAlevys Fort on Route 305, the second of Greenwood Furnace's two stacks stands with its four arches open, and the Historic American Engineering Record filed its photographs of the stack as HAER PA-287-B. The record's written history of the site is in the parent report, PA-287, and that report is where the stack's story sits.

J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history says Greenwood was begun in the fall of 1832, that building material was hard to come by, and that it was not put in blast until June 5, 1834. He names the proprietors as Judge Rawle and James Hall. The survey dates the establishment to 1834 by Norris, Rawle and Co., a firm that had recently acquired the Freedom Iron Works near Lewistown and wanted pig iron to refine at Freedom Forge. It says John Hagey contracted to build the furnace and that the stone stack was first assessed in 1835 at $10,000.

The second stack went up in the 1860s. The survey gives two different years for it and the county history a third, so this story gives none. By 1870, the survey reports, the works had $400,000 invested, 230 men employed and more than 3,000 tons of iron produced, which it calls the county's largest iron operation. Freedom Iron Company later became Logan Iron and Steel Co., which ran the furnace until 1904, and the survey says it was the last Huntingdon County furnace to go out of blast.

The survey describes Stack No. 2 as a 30 by 30 by 30 foot stack of coursed sandstone blocks, reconstructed in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, with its four arches left open to walk through, the crucible exposed, the stack open to the top and the furnace capped with concrete. Stack No. 1, the 1834 stack, is a ruin about 15 feet high, excavated about 1976.

The Pennsylvania Department of Forest and Waters acquired the furnace lands for reforestation soon after the last blast in December 1904. A state tree nursery followed at Greenwood in 1905, and a state park in 1930.

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

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