The Stone Mill at Huntingdon Furnace

The Historic American Engineering Record photographed the grist mill at Huntingdon Furnace under survey number HAER PA-243-A, a cover sheet with no written history of its own. The mill's record lives in the parent survey of the furnace, HAER PA-243, compiled by historians Nancy Shedd and Ken Heineman as part of a documentation project the survey says began in February 1987, with its results published in the 1991 county inventory.

That survey describes a three-and-a-half-story rubble stone building, 50 by 45 feet, built about 1808 and later joined by a 45 by 35 foot post-and-beam addition with weathered clapboard siding. Inside, the surveyors found chamfered posts and girders, beading on the joists, some milling machinery, and a small AC generator made by the Crocker-Wheeler Company. Outside they found an all-iron overshot water wheel fed by an iron pipe running from the creek, and a north wall partly collapsed where the wheel shaft passes through it.

The survey says the mill was built to supply flour for the ironworkers' families and feed for the furnace horses, mules and cows, and that it kept serving local farmers until about 1920. After the grinding stopped, its turbines were replaced with the metal wheel that survives, and that wheel was later connected to the generator, which the Lake and Hindman families used to furnish their property with electricity. The survey also reports that the mill is said to have held the first Sunday school and church meetings of the ironworks community.

J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history adds an earlier chapter. It says the company in due time built a good mill near the new furnace, still in operation when the book was written, and that the first Sunday school in that part of the valley opened in the old stone mill at Huntingdon Furnace about 1821, started by Samuel Mattern, Samuel Conrad, Ephraim Galbraith and Jeremiah Cunningham. The 1991 county inventory reproduces two of Jet Lowe's photographs of the mill, one of the building and one of its drive train.

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

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