Catoctin Furnace

After my adventure to Harpers Ferry the other day, I made a little side trip to Catoctin Furnace. The furnace is just off Rt 15 in Thurmont, MD. This is a little visited (I've stopped there 6 or 7 times in the past couple of years and have yet to see another car) Civil War site.

The ruins of the Furnace are sitting there just waiting to be explored. I highly recommend taking 1/2 hour and visiting this site. To explain the significance of the furnace during the Civil War, I'm going to write what it says on one of the wayside signs:

When Union General John F. Reynolds' I Corps marched by here on June 29, 1863 en route to Emmitsburg and soon to Gettysburg, his men were progressing "swimmingly". The workers of the Catoctin Furnace had little time to notice, since the charcoal furnaces were in full blast.

The landscape then looked much different than it does today. The air was filled with smoke and ash and smelled like rotten eggs, while temperatures inside the casting sheds reached temperatures upwards of 120 degrees. The mountainside was barren because it took an acre of trees a day to produce the charcoal needed to keep one furnace in blast. Large pits had been dug around the area to mine the valuable iron ore, and there were large piles of slag, the byproduct of iron making, scattered in every direction.

During the Civil War, John Baker Kunkel owned Catoctin Furnace. With two furnaces in operation, production was never interrupted during the war, and the furnace workers shipped three tons of pig iron a day east to the larger arsenals and forges that made war materiel. Iron produced here was used in the manufacturing of ironclad ships like USS Monitor. Employees worked around the clock in 12-hour shifts, earning credit at the company store. According to local tradition, lost and disoriented soldiers from both sides making their way south after the Battle of Gettysburg were offered jobs here because of the chronic labor shortage.