The ironmaster's mansion at Greenwood Furnace

Five miles east of McAlevys Fort on Route 305, the ironmaster's mansion at Greenwood Furnace is a four-bay, two-story house of coursed stone rubble with a two-story rear ell under a half-gable roof. The Historic American Engineering Record photographed it as one part of its Greenwood Furnace survey. The photographs carry only a cover sheet; the written history belongs to the parent survey, a 1988 report edited by Gray Fitzsimons and Kenneth Rose, whose author the 1989 National Register nomination names as Nancy Shedd. That report dates the house to the furnace's founding year, when Norris, Rawle and Company established the works and John Hagey contracted to construct the furnace.

J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history tells the beginning differently. It names the proprietors as Judge Rawle and James Hall, says the furnace was begun in the fall of 1832 and not put in blast until June 5, 1834, and says Hall, the resident partner, built the furnace mansion the year before the first blast and occupied it about a dozen years. The survey and Africa differ by a year on when the house went up.

The survey lists what changed afterward. Early photographs show the walls under a plaster coating, since removed. Two external chimneys were added, and probably the little bay on the south side. The interior, the survey says, is said to be much altered. The 1989 National Register nomination for Greenwood Furnace, which draws on the same HAER report, adds that the south bay was built as a kitchen, that a wooden porch runs across the front, and that access to the interior was denied.

The house outlived the works it managed. The survey calls Greenwood the last Huntingdon County furnace to go out of blast, with the final blast in December 1904; the state acquired the land for reforestation soon afterward, opened a tree nursery in 1905 and a state park in 1930. In 1883 Africa counted at Greenwood, besides the furnace and what he called the fine mansion, offices, mills and about ninety good tenements, with work for nearly two hundred men.

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

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