What I come away with from all of this is... that after walking over all sorts of mysterious artifacts (long-abandoned roads, intricate stone walls, cast iron pipes, etc.) in the woods of my youth I finally have some sense of what has happened there before my time. It is quite common there to see the artifacts of the early oilfields (wellheads, wooden tanks, bull-wheels and rod-lines) and even the last couple of timber harvests, but these remnants of clearly very-heavy industry were puzzling to me, but no-more. Nice to be able to finally put all those pieces together. My grandfather (born in 1904) used to talk about "bog ore" that he loaded on rail-cars in his very early youth. As you go along the areas near to some of these furnaces you'll see clearly excavated and long-abandoned low spots that didn't make any sense until now. Railroad lines all over that region track through some hard to understand low spots (my training is in geology, and these things weren't "natural"). Now...clearly some of them were borrow-pits used to build the nearby grade for the line or for trestles over low spots or streams, but the rest were pretty mysterious to me. Now, at least I have a plausible explanation for them.
Last edited by Lloyd3; 01/17/20 01:05 PM.
