Existing comment:
Catoctin Iron Furnace
No Time for War;
Gettysburg Campaign
When Union Gen. 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 rotted eggs, while temperatures inside the casting sheds reached 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 lag, the by-product 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 material. 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. |