The Hatfield iron works below Alexandria

East of Alexandria, between the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata and the old canal bed, six buildings remain of the Juniata Iron Works. The National Register nomination, prepared in August 1989, lists them: two ironmaster's mansions, a store and post office, a grist mill, and two workers' houses.

The works began in 1838, when Abraham Hatfield built a forge and Samuel Hatfield a rolling mill on a tract called Berwick. The nomination puts both on the south side of the river at first; Africa's 1883 county history places the forge there and the rolling mill on the opposite bank, a quarter mile below the dam. Africa adds that Samuel Hatfield, a native of Chester County, had bought three hundred acres on the river bend below Alexandria in 1836 and dammed the stream the next year for a twelve foot head. Samuel Hatfield added a puddling furnace in 1845 to make blooms. In the late 1840s the Hatfields moved the south bank machinery across the river; the nomination suggests damage from the Pumpkin Flood of October 1847 may have prompted the move. Figures for 1850 show 60 men making 1,100 tons of blooms and 150 tons of bar and sheet iron, worth $57,500.

The 1850s brought grist, saw and plaster mills; by 1860 there were 12 men in the rolling mill and 78 at the forges and puddling furnace. The rolling mill burned in 1869 and was not rebuilt. The business ended with the closing of the Pennsylvania Canal in 1875, which the Hatfields had depended on to ship their iron. Porter Township tax assessments for 1876 show the works vacated. Africa wrote in 1883 that the works had been dismantled, that the houses which once held thirty seven families had dwindled to a few, and that a good grist mill was the one thing still running.

That grist mill kept going as Hellyer's Mill, and early in the twentieth century made power for the Wilson Electric Company of Alexandria; feed milling there lasted into the late 1950s.

The first ironmaster's mansion went up in 1841 on the north bank, its five bay front facing south toward the river. Probably in the 1870s, the nomination says, the house was turned to face north and given brackets under the eaves, an arched porch and a bay window. The second mansion, dated to 1867, overlooks the later works. Both are brick.

The setting occupied by the Juniata Iron Works buildings, on a flat piece of ground between the river and the former canal bed (still identifiable as the recently abandoned bed of the Petersburg-Williamsburg Branch of the PRR), makes their dependence on a source of power and of transportation very clear.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Juniata Iron Works (reference 90000404), Juniata Iron Works, section 8 continuation (PDF page 7) · character 11,293 of the scanned text

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

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