Greenwood Lake Dam

Greenwood Furnace State Park, as the survey form described it in 1986, was an area of 334 acres inside Rothrock State Forest. The Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters first developed it as a Class A campground between 1922 and 1925. In May 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps established Camp S-59 in the park and set to work on more recreational facilities, among them the dam that holds Greenwood Lake. The camp remained active until October 1935, and the dam went up between 1933 and 1935.

The dam has a reinforced concrete core faced with stone, which the survey form says was done to give it a rustic look in keeping with the policies and philosophy of the National Park Service. There is a spillway at each end, and a stone control tower with a gabled roof stands beside the western one. The dam measures 130 feet on its north and south sides and 25 feet on its east and west ends. It was the only thing nominated: the form says the park's other CCC-built facilities had lost their original integrity.

The form was prepared by John Milner Associates of Philadelphia from a 1983 survey, and the dam went forward as part of a thematic group, Emergency Conservation Work Architecture in Pennsylvania State Parks, 1933 to 1942, under Criteria A and C. The form ties the dam to the CCC as one of the federal relief programs of the New Deal and to the rustic style of park building, in which modern materials such as reinforced concrete were often masked behind rusticated stone. It notes that the structure had by then served as a recreational facility for approximately fifty years. The National Park Service evaluation sheet is stamped January 5, 1987.

A 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's historic engineering and industrial sites adds what the dam did besides hold a lake for day use: it worked with a small turbine and generator to produce electricity for the park before commercial electric service reached the area. As of that inventory, the small stone generating tower remained at the breast of the dam, and the turbine and generator, removed from the tower, were in storage at the park.

The structure's principal feature is a rectangular control tower, constructed of randomly laid ashlar. The tower, which is adjacent to the western spillway, has a gabled roof with exposed rafters.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Greenwood Lake Dam (reference 87000050), Pennsylvania Historic Resource Survey Form, item 26 continued, p. 2 · character 13,235 of the scanned text

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

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