doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com A Brief History of Gunbarrel Iron & Steel

For those interested, this is a good source for the non-deep thinkin' internet version.
http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2014/09/

http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2014/10/

http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2014/11/

The author, an engineer, has declined to reveal his identity but posted briefly on Shotgun World back in 2011 as BobS
https://www.shotgunworld.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=259371

He borrowed some of my Damascus Knowledge stuff when discussing Pattern Welded barrels, which is OK - nothing of mine is copyrighted
http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2010/06/barrel-making-pattern-welded-or_06.html


Another essay is at the bottom here, courtesy of Doug Miller and used with his permission
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V-qkkHrs7yJakMkakxkiMx8FzJjGXUg0EDm8-_AQPiA/edit

�The Entire History of Iron and Steel�
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a20722505/history-of-steel/

"A Brief History of Iron and Steel Production" PDF by Joseph S. Spoerl
https://www.academia.edu/31060927/A_Brief_History_of_Iron_and_Steel_Production

Thanks! Very interesting.

Thank you

Good reading Dr. Drew. Thankyou. I well-remember the almost rabid detractors I'd encounter when I was researching the practicality of shooting a braided-steel gun. Working around fine guns and learning how British Proof actually worked finally dispelled the last of my reservations on that subject. But...I'm sure lots of folks still have their concerns. The stuff I found the most interesting was the development of the very early steels and how quickly that technology evolved. Fascinating history, at least for me.

Lloyd, a lot of that fascinating history was made in your home county back in Pa. Yesterday, I posted this photo of Webster Furnace, not far from Rockland. (Rockland also has a very well preserved stone furnace near Freedom Falls) I shot my first buck with a flintlock off the top of this iron making cold blast furnace that was built in 1837-38. Years before your home county made history for becoming a center for petroleum production and the world's first drilled oil well, they were a top producer of iron in the state, with 25 of these furnaces built in relative wilderness. A couple years ago, a decision to hunt that area again led me to study the history of these stone furnaces, and the iron that was produced in them.

Keith:

Great picture. Thankyou for that!

Really triggers the memories for me. As a boy, growing up in the woods around Polk, Pennsylvania I explored (played!) around similar structures not far from the Mercer County line. The closest one wasn't a stones-throw from the intersection of US 62 and old 965, almost directy across Big Sandy Creek from the Miller farm (went to grade-school with one of the Miller girls). This was just a short bike-ride up the old F&C RR tracks (now long abandoned, with many of the trestles pulled out as well!) from my elementary school. The creamy green "clinkers" in the slag were a particular favorite of mine. Glass-like and sharp, I'm sure I wrecked lots of pockets with them. There was another particular favorite near a wonderful little brook trout stream called (appropriately) "Furnace" run, which is also near the remains of the ghost town known locally as "Slatertown". My paternal great-grandfather, with the somewhat unusual nickname of "Pedro" (his given name was Preston) killed lots of big whitetail deer near that furnace. There were reportedly more iron furnaces nearby, at the little hamlet of Raymilton. Raymilton was originally Ray's Mill town, as I understand it. I used to chase ruffed grouse out there with my grandfather's circa 1914 LC Smith, amongst other things. That field grade "Elsie" had the pushbutton forend release that infringed on the Deeley patent. It's the only one I've ever seen in a lifetime of looking at old Smith guns. It was the first big purchase of my grandfather's early life. Sadly, it went the way of all hard-used things.

Keith:

Got home late last night after 10-days on the road. Took a break from the action here for a bit and looked up those old iron furnaces near my boyhood home. The internet, as usual, is full of wondrous surprises (http://www.r2parks.net/IronIndex.html). The Reno (aka North Bend) furnace was the closer one to town. The other one was evidently the Castle Rock (aka Lytle's or Sandy) furnace which is on a more-remote State Game Lands. That one always included a drive to get to it. The old Hamilton farm house is now gone and is used as a parking lot for the State Game Lands (No.39). That was always a very snakey place in my youth. Big rattlesnakes!

You know...it would be fun to walk that ground again. Maybe in the Fall sometime when I can drag my old 16 along (& perhaps my boy as well?). There were always a few grouse in there too.

Lloyd, I have probably read every word on that http://www.r2parks.net/IronIndex.html website. You will want to check out the psu.edu PDF of "Old Stone Blast Furnaces of Western Pa." Another great website with lots of info on furnaces in Venango, Clarion, Butler, Armstrong, etc. counties is this one:

https://www.mindat.org/article.php/1931/22.+Iron+and+The+Old+Stone+Furnaces+of+Western+Pennsylvania

One great picture of the author standing under a tuyere arch gives you an idea of the size of these structures. Please don't hate me for getting you started down this rathole. I found it pretty addictive, and especially interesting because of how much time I have spent hunting near these areas. We're supposed to get snow tonight, so I'll be out after deer with the flintlock tomorrow.

I've seen several ruins of these old stone blast furnaces while hunting these various places, and didn't know what they were. Little remains of some of them. Others, like Rockland Furnace and Victory Furnace are pretty well preserved. There are some ruins that are under an archeological study at Springfield Falls in Leesburg, a short distance away in Mercer Co. There is a really nice waterfalls near the State Game Lands there, and I had always heard, until a few years ago, that the cut stone foundation and ruins were remains of a flour or grist mill. But it was actually an iron making cold blast furnace that had a 38 foot tall waterwheel to power the bellows. It boggles my mind to think how these structures were built and operated in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, no gas or diesel powered equipment, nothing but men and horses. Now I know the origins of the abandoned sandstone quarry about a mile west, in the worst thicket of multiflora rose and wild blackberries I've ever fought through. The forests around them were consumed as over an acre of trees per day was cut and converted to charcoal... with no chain saws or log skidders. To look at many of these places today, you'd swear they were never developed. It's humbling to know that everything we build will be swallowed up by time and nature.

Keith: It really was the middle-of-nowhere then. Hell...it still is. I have a brand-new, handmade, left-handed, 42-inch swamped barrel, Siler-locked flintlock .45 long rifle I had hoped to hunt back there this year, but internecine family warfare has pretty well-ruined that one. Oh well.

I used to ride bikes in an abandoned quarry up on Palm Hill near to the Reno furnace and wonder what it had all been for. I guess I know now. Where did the ore come from to feed these units? It almost had to be fairly close. We clearly stand on the shoulders of giants.

Click on that one link I provided Lloyd, and you will see it was all around you. I've seen a million of those reddish rocks and didn't know our ancestors figured out how to melt them down to make iron. That was why they built those furnaces where they did. They had to be close to the raw materials. There are several types of iron ore of varying quality and percentage of iron content. They also needed some limestone, and of course wood for charcoal... lots of wood. Some later furnaces used coal, and we had lots of that too. My buddy and I used to dig buckets of coal to take to camp to feed the potbelly stove. I've learned that old surface seam was once used to feed one of these furnaces.

None of that stuff was easy to transport any distance back then, when the few roads were little more than dirt trails. It helped if they could put a furnace near a stream large enough to float a boat, to transport the iron to the Allegheny or other rivers to get it to market. Andrew McCaslin, the guy who built Rockland furnace, and his wife were drowned in the river when their little barge capsized in rapids a couple miles downstream as they were transporting pig iron to Pittsburgh.

I laughed when you said it is still the middle of nowhere. I remember the first time I took my Brother-in-law from California to the hunting camp near Tionesta. He was amazed at the amount of wilderness and wooded lands. He had always been under the impression that Pa. is nothing but urban sprawl and cities. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Thank-you for pointing out the iron smelting history of PA keith.

There is a fair amount of info available on the net and I've enjoyed learning about the subject. I had no idea that iron production on this continent dated that far back.

Meanwhile in the spirit of these steel history threads, I believe I've found the formula for Beretta Steelium.

Fe7NiCr-3He

Steelium.... good grief.

Keith, have a great deer hunt with the flinter. I�ve hunted deer and elk for many decades and the only gun I�ve had in my hands has been a flintlock rifle. Started shooting muzzleloaders in �57 and never looked back.

Some great historical information, keith. Thanks from another old m/ler.

SRH

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.

Probably some 30-35 miles from where I live iron was formerly smelted in the area around a small town known as Tracy City, TN. They fired their furnaces with coke. A large number of the coke ovens are still there, & I suspect some of the furnaces as well, though I am not overly familiar with the area. Over the years I have worked with several people from there & have seen a few of the od coke ovens.

Lloyd, that Miller girl you dated may well have been a distant relative of mine. Though Miller is my middle name it was derived from my Great Grandmother's maiden name, one Nanny Miller. Yes, Nanny was her Name, she died before becoming a grandmother. Her ancestors had moved from Penn during the "Whiskey Rebellion, & eventually settled in Rutherford County TN & a small town grew up around them known as Millersburg. She married my G Grandfather, Samuel Black Bigham. Their son, my Grandfather (Papa) was named Miller Bigham but later added an N & became Miller Bingham.

Mr. Miller: Sadly, I never dated any of the Miller girls from that part of the world, but I believe her little brother bought my paternal Grandfather's home after he passed in '93. There was a pig-iron ingot on the floor of his garage that he used as a stopping-block for his cars. I'm sorry now that I never asked him about it (didn't even realize what it was until after all this discussion). I'll bet it's still there. The Whiskey Rebellion caused the Scots-Irish of my early world to relocate all the way to Texas from what I understand. There was a series a few (many?) years ago titled "the History of English" that tracked the unique brand of "English" spoken from that time all across the intermountain regions of Appalachia. Tennessee was clearly the recipient of some of those exiles. I knew about the history of the Region during the French & Indian Wars (lots of English pennies and arrowheads were found in a freshly plowed field near Big Sandy creek there for years. Ever hear of "Murdering Town"? Rugged county in those days.

Sorry, Lloyd;
I went back & re-read your post & you said you went to grade school with one of the Miller Girls. By the time I got to the 2nd page here I got mixed up & was thinking you had said you dated her. Thanks for the history. I have always assumed my Miller ancestors were German, but that may not be the case. Some years back though an article in the American Rifleman written by a serviceman who had hunted in Germany had a picture of a Forrestor who could have passed for a twin to one of my Mothers Brothers.

No worries Mr. Miller, most of the Millers I have encountered over the years are your usual mix of Brit... plus Irish, German, Scots. etc. To some degree we're all Heinz 57 now. The melting pot actually does seem to work after a fashion.

Thanks for the wishes for a good flintlock deer hunt. I'm afraid my freezer won't have venison until next year, but it was great to be out there, and I saw things that made it seem like a very successful hunt. On Friday, I decided to go to the area around Freedom Falls and the Rockland Furnace which was built in 1832. I found it pretty easily, and the area was open to hunting. I took a number of photos with my phone, and will post some as soon as I dump them into the computer. The scenery was gorgeous.

Unlike the Webster Furnace I posted a pic of, The Rockland Furnace is more intact, and someone has taken the time to clear away brush and to cut down a number of small trees growing out of it. This is wonderful, because those roots would eventually push the cut stones apart and topple the furnace. The Mill Race and Wheel Pit are largely intact, and you could see into the bosh and up the flue. I still can't imagine how they managed to build and operate these things. While not nearly as large as the Pyramids of Egypt or other ancient ruins, a number of the cut stones are large enough to break the leaf springs and blow the tires of my pickup truck. And all they had was wooden wagons and stone boats pulled by draft horses.

Like Lloyd says, learning more about these furnaces answers a lot of questions, but it makes me think of many more. How did they move these stones? How did they cut them without steel chisels or carbide or diamond saws? There is no shortage of rocks in the Rockland area, with many glacial boulders bigger than a large house. When they transported the pig iron down the Allegheny River to sell it in Pittsburgh, how did they get back home, going upstream against the current? They sure didn't fire up the Evinrude because gasoline engines hadn't been invented yet.

Another great website I found is this one... and it also has info on early lead shot towers if you navigate from their home page:

https://www.oldindustry.org/iron.html

Cool history. Looking forward to the pictures.

Best,
Ted

Me too! I really have missed Penn's woods in winter.

My only muzzle-loader buck..



and the ride home.

Lloyd, that's a nice one, the rifle and the buck...Geo

I knew it! You're a lefty! Nice Hawken flinter and buck nonetheless. CVA? Traditions?

Thankyou all. I prefer the term "southpaw". It's a Charles Daily .50 (Italian).

A nice deer, good deal

Apologies for the previously posted photography. I have so few winter shots from the "old country".

And with a flintlock! Well done.....and welcome to the dark side.

My latest smokepole...



Now all I need to do is get to use it.

Lloyd, sorry for the delay, but here are some pics from the area around Freedom Falls and Rockland Furnace that I took while flintlock deer hunting. This furnace was built in 1832:





The pic above is from the hill on the back of the furnace. There would have been a covered wooden charging bridge from here to the top of the furnace for the workers to dump in iron ore, charcoal, and limestone.

Here, I was standing on the remains of the Mill Race near the wheel pit where the water wheel stood:



This is a pic of the tuyere that faces Schull Run, where the waterwheel would pump the drums or bellows to force air into the furnace. I stuffed the bill of my hat into the stones at about 6 feet high to give a sense of scale. This furnace is about 30 feet tall, and the tuyeres are about 10 1/2 feet wide at ground level.

The Furnace in the preceding post stands along Schull Run about 1/3 mile upstream from the Allegheny River. It is about 150-200 yards downstream from Freedom Falls. The falls are about 50 feet wide and 25 feet tall.



Here's a shot of the falls from the furnace. I was standing on the end of the Mill Race:



Here's a view of the furnace from the creek, showing both tuyeres:



This area is open to public hunting, but there isn't a lot of feed here in these hemlocks to attract deer, even though it's a beautiful area...



...so I moved to another spot about 2 miles away, near some abandoned farms. As you know, Venango County has some wild and wooly creatures. Fortunately, there are warning signs along the dirt roads:





The small print at the bottom of this one warns you to avoid making eye contact:

Keith: Stunning photography of Penn's woods in winter, thank you for that. Gorgeous furnace shots too, makes me want to go pick up my smokestick and walk those hemlocks again. You know, I grew up not far from those very pretty falls and yet I'd never even heard of them until the last couple of years. Venango county didn't have much of a skunk-ape problem when I was growing up there. Must be yet another wave of immigrants?

wonderful thread and photography...thank you...

Lloyd, all of those pics were taken with my cell phone camera. I'd like to go back and take some more with a better camera. But it might be tough to get there on an equally beautiful day... a bright sunny 15 degree winter morning in Pennsylvania with a couple inches of fresh powder snow. That whole Rockland-Kennerdell area is just full of gorgeous scenery. I've hunted this area for a lot of years, and like you, I never knew about the falls or furnace. Here's a couple more:





And there are a lot more pics here in this link that show the area when it has really frozen solid! Also some views of the Rockland Tunnel which is at the head of the Alleghany River Trail, which is just a short way down the road from the Falls.

https://www.interestingpennsylvania.com/2016/03/freedom-falls-rockland-furnace-and.html

This is why Flintlock Deer Season is my absolute favorite time of the year. Most days, you never see another person until you are driving home in the dark. Every time out is wonderful whether you get a deer or not.

Cellphone photography has clearly come a very long way as those shots are simply beautiful. Mind you, I'm biased towards the hardwood forrests of my youth. Yea, I've always enjoyed the post Christmas muzzle-stuffer season back there when I could. Beautiful time to be out and about.